Policy controls

Policy controls define the conditions under whether attempt decides to retry or stop retrying a command. They use predicates that examine the command's exit status, output, or signals.

Each predicate has two variants: retry and stop. Retry predicates cause attempt to retry the command, while stop predicates cause us to terminate.

Usage

Retry predicates are used to identify temporary error conditions, such as network timeouts or rate limiting errors, which may be resolved by retrying. attempt will try to rerun the child command if a retry predicate is matched. It will may be prevented from doing so if the maximum number of attempts has been reached, or if a stop predicate is matched.

Stop predicates are used to identify permanent error conditions, such as authentication errors or malformed content errors, which will never be resolved by retrying. If a stop predicate matches, attempt will imediately cease retrying the child command.

Precedence

Stop predicates always have precedence over retry predicates.

> attempt --stop-if-status 1 --retry-if-status 1 /bin/false
Command exited: exit status: 1.
Stop: Status matches.
Terminated: Command has failed, but cannot be retried.
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