What is the "right" way to deal with EPIPE and other socket errors in Node.js?

The only way I have found to "catch" EPIPE errors thrown asynchronously by a socket timing out or closing prematurely is to directly attach an event handler to the socket object itself, as demonstrated in the documentation here:

https://nodejs.org/api/errors.html

const net = require('net');
const connection = net.connect('localhost');

// Adding an 'error' event handler to a stream:
connection.on('error', (err) => {
  // If the connection is reset by the server, or if it can't
  // connect at all, or on any sort of error encountered by
  // the connection, the error will be sent here.
  console.error(err);
});

This works, but is in many cases unhelpful -- if you're accessing a database or another service that has a node driver, the request and socket objects are likely inaccessible from your app code.

The most obvious solution is "don't do things that generate these errors" but since any non-trivial application is dependent on other services, no amount of input-checking in advance can guarantee that the service on the other end won't hang up unexpectedly, throwing an EPIPE in your code and in all likelihood crashing Node.

So, the options for handling this situation seem to be:

• Let the error crash your app and use nodemon or supervisor to automatically restart. This isn't clean, but it seems like the only way to really guarantee you'll get back up and running safely.

• Write custom connection clients for dependent services. This let's you attach error handlers where known problems could occur. But it violates DRY and means that you're now on the hook for maintaining your own custom client code when otherwise reasonable open source solutions already exist. Basically, it adds a huge maintenance burden for a slightly cleaner solution to a fairly rare problem.

Am I missing something, or are those the best options available?

via gengel