Golang Errors with Stack Trace and Source Fragments

April 1, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

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Tired of uninformative error output? Probably this will be more convenient:

Output

Example

package main

import (
	"io/ioutil"

	"github.com/ztrue/tracerr"
)

func main() {
	if err := read(); err != nil {
		tracerr.PrintSourceColor(err)
	}
}

func read() error {
	return readNonExistent()
}

func readNonExistent() error {
	_, err := ioutil.ReadFile("/tmp/non_existent_file")
	// Add stack trace to existing error, no matter if it's nil.
	return tracerr.Wrap(err)
}

Find more executable examples in examples dir.

How to Use

Import

import "github.com/ztrue/tracerr"

Create New Error

err := tracerr.New("some error")

Or:

err := tracerr.Errorf("some error %d", num)

Add Stack Trace to Existing Error

If err is nil then it still be nil with no stack trace added.

err = tracerr.Wrap(err)

Stack trace will be printed only if err is of type tracerr.Error, otherwise just error text will be shown.

This will print error message and stack trace if any:

tracerr.Print(err)

This will add source code:

tracerr.PrintSource(err)

It's able to set up number of lines of code to display for each frame, which is 6 by default:

tracerr.PrintSource(err, 9)

Or to set up number of lines before and after traced line:

tracerr.PrintSource(err, 5, 2)

The same, but with color, which is much more useful:

tracerr.PrintSourceColor(err)
tracerr.PrintSourceColor(err, 9)
tracerr.PrintSourceColor(err, 5, 2)

Save Output to Variable

It's also able to save output to variable instead of printing it, which works the same way:

text := tracerr.Sprint(err)
text := tracerr.SprintSource(err)
text := tracerr.SprintSource(err, 9)
text := tracerr.SprintSource(err, 5, 2)

Get Stack Trace

Stack trace will be empty if err is not an instance of tracerr.Error.

frames := tracerr.StackTrace(err)

Or if err is of type tracerr.Error:

frames := err.StackTrace()

Get Original Error

Unwrapped error will be nil if err is nil and will be the same error if err is not an instance of tracerr.Error.

err = tracerr.Unwrap(err)

Or if err is of type tracerr.Error:

err = err.Unwrap()

Performance

Benchmarks for creating a new error with a stack trace of different depth:

GOMAXPROCS=1 go test -bench=. -benchmem
goos: linux
goarch: amd64
pkg: github.com/ztrue/tracerr
cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-14700KF
BenchmarkNew/5           4500129               267.1 ns/op           256 B/op          4 allocs/op
BenchmarkNew/10          3325456               359.5 ns/op           256 B/op          4 allocs/op
BenchmarkNew/20          1000000              1001 ns/op             576 B/op          5 allocs/op
BenchmarkNew/40           538689              2171 ns/op            1216 B/op          6 allocs/op
PASS
ok      github.com/ztrue/tracerr        5.246s