Catching Exceptions from library using Laravel 5.2

Question

Pretty new to laravel, so I'm not exactly sure how it handles errors and how best to catch them.

I'm using a 3rd party game server connection library that can query game servers in order to pull data such as players, current map etc..

This library is called Steam Condenser : https://github.com/koraktor/steam-condenser

I have imported this using composer in my project and all seems to be working fine, however I'm having trouble with catching exceptions that are thrown by the library.

One example is where the game server you are querying is offline.

Here is my code:

public function show($server_name)
{
    try{
        SteamSocket::setTimeout(3000);
        $server = server::associatedServer($server_name);
        $server_info = new SourceServer($server->server_ip);

        $server_info->rconAuth($server->server_rcon);

        $players = $server_info->getPlayers();
        $total_players = count($players);

        $more_info = $server_info->getServerInfo();

        $maps = $server_info->rconExec('maps *');
        preg_match_all("/(?<=fs\)).*?(?=\.bsp)/", $maps, $map_list);    
    }catch(SocketException $e){
        dd("error");
    }
    return view('server', compact('server', 'server_info', 'total_players', 'players', 'more_info', 'map_list'));
}

If the server is offline, it will throw a SocketException, which I try to catch, however this never seems to happen. I then get the error page with the trace.

This causes a bit of a problem as I wish to simply tell the end user that the server is offline, however I cannot do this if I can't catch this error.

Is there something wrong with my try/catch? Does laravel handle catching errors in this way? Is this an issue with the 3rd party library?

Answer 1

A couple things:

• Does the trace lead to the SocketException or to a different error? It's possible that a different error is being caught before the SocketException can be thrown.
• Your catch statement is catching SocketException. Are you importing the full namespace at the top of your PHP file? use SteamCondenser\Exceptions\SocketException;

Also for debugging purposes, you could do an exception "catch all" and dump the type of exception:

try {
    ...
}catch(\Exception $e){
    dd(get_class($e));
}

If you still get the stack trace after trying the above code, then an error is being thrown before the try/catch block starts.