async-break-finder

async-break-finder

This is a testing tool to help ensure that you've preserved asynchronous context between two points in your code flow. Preserving asynchronous context allows things like AsyncLocalStorage to work correctly across asynchronous boundaries, and is cruicial for higher-level tools like APM tools.

Usage

import asyncBreakFinder from 'async-break-finder'

/* And then, somewhere in your code flow... */
const start = asyncBreakFinder()

doSomethingAsynchronous(() => {
  asyncBreakFinder(start)
})

Upon the second call to asyncBreakFinder(), it will search along the asynchronous causation chain from that point. If it finds the initial call to asyncBreakFinder(), then it will silently succeed. If it can't find the initial call, it will throw an error. The error message shows the call stacks at each initialization of an AsyncResource starting at the initial call, and also the chain of call stacks leading up to the second call. This should give enough information to figure out where the chain breaks in order to fix the context.

In general, it's best to avoid putting the initial call at the top level async context, otherwise your async tree will always contain everything in the entire process, and so a path will always be able to be found. This makes it impossible to find any errors with this tool. Instead, try to do the initial call as close as possible to the asynchronous operating you're trying to test. If the operation happens at the top level asynchronous scope, try wrapping the invocation in a setImmediate to get a fresh async context.

By default, stack frames coming from Node.js internals are hidden. To show all stack frames, set the environment variable ABF_KEEP_INTERNALS to anything.

To render the data as a graph using graphviz in an HTML file, set the environment variable ABF_HTML to anything.

Special mode for HTTP requests

The provided async-break-finder/http module will automaticaly create a start point at the entry point of any inbound HTTP request, and check it when the response has finished. To use this, simply require or import async-break-finder/http, or use the command-line option --require async-break-finder/http. No additional code is required.

$ # e.g.
$ node --require async-break-finder/http my-app.js

Note that success here does not imply that you don't have any async context breakage, but does mean that you have none between your request and your response. If you have other asynchronous actions that aren't waited upon in order to send the response, they won't be checked here.

You can retrieve the start point for a given request by using the exported getStartForRequest function.

/* e.g. */
import asyncBreakFinder from 'async-break-finder'
import { getStartForRequest } from 'async-break-finder/http'

/* And then, somewhere in you code where you have access to the request... */
asyncBreakFinder(getStartForRequest(request))

What to do when your context is broken

Eventually when looking through the data provided by error messages from this library, you'll find that asynchronous context is broken at some kind of async operation. By moving your start and end points, you should be able to narrow it down to a single operation, like in the usage example above. If the example above fails, then one easy fix might be the following.

import { AsyncResource } from 'async_hooks'

/* Somewhere in the code flow... */
doSomethingAsynchronous(AsyncResource.bind(() => {
  // Now we have the same async context as before this async call
}))

Please read the documentation for AsyncResource for more information.

License

The MIT License. See LICENSE.txt