Sidekiq transient vs fatal errors

Is there a way to err from a Sidekiq job in a way that tells Sidekiq that "this error is fatal and unrecoverable, do not retry, send it straight to dead job queue"?

Looking at Sidekiq Error Handling documentation, it seems like it interpret all errors as transient, and will retry a job (if retry is enabled) regardless of the error type.

Solution

If found on GitHub a solution for your problem. In that post they suggested to write a custom middleware that handles the exceptions you want to prevent retries for. This is a basic example:

def call(worker, msg, queue)
  begin
    yield
  rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound => e
    msg['retry'] = false
    raise
  end
end

You can extending that you get:

def call(worker, msg, queue)
  begin
    yield
  rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound => e
    msg['retry'] = false
    raise
  rescue Exception => e
    if worker.respond_to?(:handle_error)
      worker.handle_error(e)
    else
      raise
    end
  end
end