longrun

longrun

A self-contained Go package for long-running tasks with interval scheduling, per-error retry, and exponential backoff.

Zero external dependencies beyond golang.org/x/sync.

Overview

longrun provides two primitives:

• Task — a self-contained unit of work: one-shot or interval, with optional per-error retry and backoff. Can be used standalone via Wait(ctx).
• Runner — orchestrates N tasks. When any task dies permanently, cancels all others and runs shutdown hooks.

Task execution model

Task.Wait(ctx)
  └→ runWithPolicy (restart loop + backoff)
       └→ runLoop (ticker or one-shot)
            └→ runOnce (single invocation ± timeout)

Constructors

NewOneShotTask

Execute once. If rules is nil — no retries, any error is fatal.

// Simple one-shot (useful in Runner for coordination)
task := longrun.NewOneShotTask("migrate", db.AutoMigrate, nil)

// One-shot with retry
task := longrun.NewOneShotTask("migrate", db.AutoMigrate, []longrun.TransientRule{
    {Err: ErrConnRefused, MaxRetries: 5, Backoff: longrun.DefaultBackoff()},
})

NewIntervalTask

Ticker loop. If rules is nil — any error kills the task.

// Interval without retry
task := longrun.NewIntervalTask("healthcheck", 30*time.Second, check, nil)

// Interval with per-error retry
task := longrun.NewIntervalTask("poll", 10*time.Second, w.poll, []longrun.TransientRule{
    // GitHub API — might be under load, retry carefully
    {Err: ErrFetchIssues, MaxRetries: 5, Backoff: longrun.BackoffConfig{
        Initial: 2 * time.Second, Max: 60 * time.Second, Multiplier: 3.0,
    }},
    // Local DB — not loaded, retry aggressively
    {Err: ErrStoreIssues, MaxRetries: longrun.UnlimitedRetries, Backoff: longrun.BackoffConfig{
        Initial: 100 * time.Millisecond, Max: 2 * time.Second, Multiplier: 2.0,
    }},
}, longrun.WithLogger(logger))

TransientRule

Each rule binds an error to its retry settings. Different errors can have different retry budgets and backoff curves.

type TransientRule struct {
    Err        any           // error sentinel (errors.Is) or pointer-to-type (errors.As)
    MaxRetries int           // 0 = default (3), -1 = unlimited
    Backoff    BackoffConfig
}

The Err field accepts two forms:

• error value (sentinel) → matched via errors.Is
• *T where T implements error → matched via errors.As

Examples:

{Err: ErrTimeout}           // sentinel → errors.Is
{Err: (*net.OpError)(nil)}  // pointer-to-type → errors.As

Passing nil or an unsupported type panics at construction time: "longrun.NewMatcher: errVal must be an error value or pointer to error type (*T), got: %T"

Each rule has its own attempt budget. MaxRetries limits consecutive failures for a given rule. When an interval task completes a successful tick, all rule trackers reset to zero — so intermittent failures separated by successful ticks never accumulate toward MaxRetries. For one-shot tasks the budget is never reset mid-execution.

Building blocks

The package exposes low-level building blocks used internally by Task. They are exported for testability and advanced use cases, but most users should only create Tasks.

Options

longrun.WithTimeout(30 * time.Second)  // per-invocation timeout
longrun.WithShutdown(server.Shutdown)  // graceful shutdown hook
longrun.WithDelay(5 * time.Second)     // delay before first execution
longrun.WithLogger(logger)             // custom slog.Logger

WithDelay

Delays the first execution by the given duration.

• For interval tasks: first tick fires after delay, then every interval.
• For one-shot tasks: execution starts after delay.
• Delay is independent of interval.

Runner

Orchestrates multiple tasks. Does NOT handle OS signals — pass a cancellable context.

ctx, cancel := signal.NotifyContext(context.Background(), os.Interrupt, syscall.SIGTERM)
defer cancel()

runner := longrun.NewRunner(longrun.RunnerOptions{Logger: logger})
runner.Add(migrate)
runner.Add(poll)
runner.Add(server)

err := runner.Wait(ctx)

When any task returns a permanent error, Runner cancels all remaining tasks via context, waits for all goroutines to finish, then runs shutdown hooks in LIFO order (reverse of Add).

Package structure

pkg/longrun/
├── backoff.go       BackoffConfig, DefaultBackoff(), constants
├── matcher.go       Matcher — errors.Is / errors.As pattern matching
├── tracker.go       RuleTracker — per-rule retry budget
├── rule.go          TransientRule (user config) + ruleState (internal)
├── option.go        Functional options (WithTimeout, WithDelay, ...)
├── task.go          Task, NewOneShotTask, NewIntervalTask, Wait
├── runner.go        Runner, NewRunner, Add, Wait, LIFO shutdown
├── *_test.go        Blackbox tests (package longrun_test)
├── README.md
└── TODO.md

Observability

Every invocation of the work function is automatically wrapped in an OpenTelemetry span inside runOnce. The span is named after the task (name parameter from the constructor).

• No SDK configured → otel.Tracer returns a no-op tracer, zero overhead.
• SDK configured → every invocation, retry, and error is visible in the tracing backend. The span records errors automatically: span.RecordError(err) + span.SetStatus(codes.Error, ...) on failure. Users get full observability without writing any OTEL code in their work functions.

[longrun/task: "polling issues"]           ← automatic span from longrun
└─[IssuePolling.work]                    ← user's child span (optional)
└─[Parser.Run]                       ← domain span (optional)
└─[SQL INSERT]                   ← infra span (optional)

Combined with a slog.Handler that extracts span context (trace_id, span_id, scope), every log line emitted via logger.InfoContext(ctx, ...) is automatically correlated with the active trace — zero boilerplate in business code.

Design decisions

• Transient errors whitelist — empty rules = all errors permanent. Lower layers provide sentinel errors, orchestrator decides what to retry.
• Per-error retry — different errors can have different MaxRetries and BackoffConfig. Careful retry for loaded external APIs, aggressive retry for local resources.
• Own backoff — math.Pow based, no external dependencies.
• Signals are not the package's responsibility — Runner accepts ctx, caller handles signals.
• Shutdown after all tasks stop — shutdown hooks run after grp.Wait(), never concurrently with running tasks.
• LIFO shutdown — last added task shuts down first (like defer). Will transition to reverse topological order when DependsOn is implemented.
• Typed nil pointer for type matching — (*MyError)(nil) triggers errors.As path; non-nil error values trigger errors.Is. Checked before error interface to avoid ambiguity.

MaxRetries semantics

Future

See TODO.md for planned features.