[Feature Proposal] [ActiveJob] Allow unlimited retry_on attempts

rubyonrails-core
1

I would like to propose an addition to the ActiveJob retry_on API to allow the attempts argument to be the symbol ‘:unlimited’ in addition to the specific number of retry attempts that it allows today.

The code change required would be minimal, likely only requiring changing the test in activejob/exceptions.rb to see whether a retry should be called to if attempts == :unlimited || executions < attempts.

It seems this would be most valuable when dealing with infrastructure issues that are expected to recover and the alternative would be taking manual intervention to re-enqueue the job once the issue is fixed. Presently, you could just choose an arbitrarily high number of allowed attempts but that seems somewhat artificial and inexpressive.

2

Totally, I’ve wanted this recently too. I hacked it with: retry_on Error, wait: 10.seconds, attempts: Float::INFINITY.

I don’t necessarily like the unlimited name, but we can figure that out. Depending on how it reads, could also consider adding a retry_forever method.

3

PR to implement this: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/41761

I couldn’t think of a symbol that sounded better than :unlimited but I’m certainly open to suggestions.

4

A lot of older software uses 0 as the signal for “keep trying forever”. Not sure if that’s just familiar or intuitive.

Walter