Socket.IO - Error Handling

We've worked on local servers till now which will almost never give us errors related to connections, timeouts, etc. But in real life production environments, handling such errors are of utmost importance. So we'll now discuss how we can handle connection errors on the client side.

The client API provides us with following built in events:

• connectWhen the client successfully connects.
• connectingWhen the client is in process of connecting.
• disconnectWhen the client is disconnected
• connect_failedWhen connection to server fails
• errorAn error event is sent from the server
• messageWhen server sends a message using the send function.
• reconnectWhen reconnection to server is successful.
• reconnectingWhen the client is in process of connecting.
• reconnect_failedWhen the reconnection attempt fails.

To handle errors, we can handle these events using out socket object that we created on our client. For example, if we have a connection that fails, we can use the following to connect to the server again:

socket.on('connect_failed', function() {
    document.write("Sorry, there seems to be an issue with the connection!");
})