Catch `Exception` in fast api globally

Question

I am trying to catch unhandled exceptions at global level. So somewhere in main.py file I have the below:

@app.exception_handler(Exception)
async def exception_callback(request: Request, exc: Exception):
  logger.error(exc.detail)

But the above method is never executed. However, if I write a custom exception and try to catch it (as shown below), it works just fine.

class MyException(Exception):
  #some code

@app.exception_handler(MyException)
async def exception_callback(request: Request, exc: MyException):
  logger.error(exc.detail)

I have gone through Catch exception type of Exception and process body request #575. But this bug talks about accessing request body. After seeing this bug, I feel it should be possible to catch Exception. FastAPI version I am using is: fastapi>=0.52.0.

Thanks in advance :)

---

Update

There are multiple answers, I am thankful to all the readers and authors here. I was revisiting this solution in my application. Now I see that I needed to set debug=False, default it's False, but I had it set to True in

server = FastAPI(
    title=app_settings.PROJECT_NAME,
    version=app_settings.VERSION,
)

It seems that I missed it when @iedmrc commented on answer given by @Kavindu Dodanduwa.

Answer 1

In case you want to capture all unhandled exceptions (internal server error), there's a very simple way of doing it. Documentation

from fastapi import FastAPI
from starlette.requests import Request
from starlette.responses import Response

app = FastAPI()

async def catch_exceptions_middleware(request: Request, call_next):
    try:
        return await call_next(request)
    except Exception:
        # you probably want some kind of logging here
        return Response("Internal server error", status_code=500)

app.middleware('http')(catch_exceptions_middleware)

Make sure you place this middleware before everything else.

Answer 2

Adding a custom APIRoute can be also be used to handle global exceptions. The advantage of this approach is that if a http exception is raised from the custom route it will be handled by default Starlette's error handlers:

from typing import Callable

from fastapi import Request, Response, HTTPException, APIRouter, FastAPI
from fastapi.routing import APIRoute
from .logging import logger


class RouteErrorHandler(APIRoute):
    """Custom APIRoute that handles application errors and exceptions"""

    def get_route_handler(self) -> Callable:
        original_route_handler = super().get_route_handler()

        async def custom_route_handler(request: Request) -> Response:
            try:
                return await original_route_handler(request)
            except Exception as ex:
                if isinstance(ex, HTTPException):
                    raise ex
                logger.exception("uncaught error")
                # wrap error into pretty 500 exception
                raise HTTPException(status_code=500, detail=str(ex))

        return custom_route_handler


router = APIRouter(route_class=RouteErrorHandler)

app = FastAPI()
app.include_router(router)

Worked for me with fastapi==0.68.1.

More on custom routes: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/advanced/custom-request-and-route/

Answer 3

You can do something like this. It should return a json object with your custom error message also works in debugger mode.

from fastapi import FastAPI
from fastapi.responses import JSONResponse

app = FastAPI()

@app.exception_handler(Exception)
async def validation_exception_handler(request, err):
    base_error_message = f"Failed to execute: {request.method}: {request.url}"
    # Change here to LOGGER
    return JSONResponse(status_code=400, content={"message": f"{base_error_message}. Detail: {err}"})

Answer 4

It is a known issue on the Fastapi and Starlette.

I am trying to capture the StarletteHTTPException globally by a following simple sample.

import uvicorn

from fastapi import FastAPI
from starlette.requests import Request
from starlette.exceptions import HTTPException as StarletteHTTPException
from starlette.responses import JSONResponse

app = FastAPI()


@app.exception_handler(StarletteHTTPException)
async def exception_callback(request: Request, exc: Exception):
    print("test")
    return JSONResponse({"detail": "test_error"}, status_code=500)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    uvicorn.run("test:app", host="0.0.0.0", port=1111, reload=True)

It works. I open the browser and call the endpoint / and try to access http://127.0.0.1:1111/ , it will return the json {"detail":"test_error"} with HTTP code "500 Internal Server Error" .

However, when I only changed StarletteHTTPException to Exception in the @app.exception_handler,

import uvicorn

from fastapi import FastAPI
from starlette.requests import Request
from starlette.exceptions import HTTPException as StarletteHTTPException
from starlette.responses import JSONResponse

app = FastAPI()


@app.exception_handler(Exception)
async def exception_callback(request: Request, exc: Exception):
    print("test")
    return JSONResponse({"detail": "test_error"}, status_code=500)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    uvicorn.run("test:app", host="0.0.0.0", port=1111, reload=True)

The method exception_callback could not capture the StarletteHTTPException when I accessed the http://127.0.0.1:1111/ . It reported 404 error.

The excepted behaviour should be: StarletteHTTPException error could be captured by the method exception_handler decorated by Exception because StarletteHTTPException is the child class of Exception.

However, it is a known issue reported in Fastapi and Starlette

• https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/2750
• https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/2683
• https://github.com/encode/starlette/issues/1129

So we are not able to acheieve the goal currently.