Returning the details of backend errors

Document updated on May 2, 2021

When you are willing to manipulate or aggregate data, KrakenD’s policy regarding errors and status codes is to hide from the client any backend details. The philosophy behind this is that clients have to be decoupled from its underlying services.

If in the other hand, your endpoint connects to a single backend with no manipulation, use the no-op encoding which returns the response to the client as is, preserving its form: body, headers, status codes and such.

You can override the default policy of hiding backend error details.

Showing backend errors

If you prefer revealing these details to the client, you can choose to show them in the gateway response. To achieve this, enable the return_error_details option in backend the configuration, and then all errors will appear in the desired key.

Place the following configuration inside the backend configuration:

"extra_config": {
    "github.com/devopsfaith/krakend/http": {
        "return_error_details": "backend_alias"
    }
}

Notice that return_error_details sets an alias for this backend.

Response for failing backends

When a backend fails, you’ll find an object named error_ + backend_alias containing the detailed errors of the backend. The returned structure on error contains the status code and the body:

"error_backend_alias": {
	"http_status_code": 404,
	"http_body": "404 page not found\\n"
}

If there are no errors, the key won’t exist.

Example

The following configuration sets an endpoint with two backends that return its errors in two different keys:

{
	"endpoint": "/detail_error",
	"backend": [
		{
			"host": ["http://127.0.0.1:8081"],
			"url_pattern": "/foo",
			"extra_config": {
				"github.com/devopsfaith/krakend/http": {
					"return_error_details": "backend_a"
				}
			}
		},
		{
			"host": ["http://127.0.0.1:8081"],
			"url_pattern": "/bar",
			"extra_config": {
				"github.com/devopsfaith/krakend/http": {
					"return_error_details": "backend_b"
				}
			}
		}
	]
}

Let’s say your backend_b has failed, but your backend_a worked just fine. The client response could look like this:

{
	"error_backend_b": {
		"http_status_code": 404,
		"http_body": "404 page not found\\n"
	},
	"foo": 42
}