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[FR] Auto-retry FCM requests that failed due to an internal error (messaging/internal-error)

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#2,604 3 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
node.js, typescript
Domain
api, backend

Research direction

Start with src/utils/api-request.ts at the retry handling referenced in the issue, then review Firebase Cloud Messaging's retry guidance and pull request #1739. The change should cover messaging/internal-error responses and either update the default retry configuration or allow custom retry configurations.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

needs-triage type: feature request

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Our Sentry has captured about 20,000 messaging/internal-error errors. This means that due to some internal FCM error, we haven't sent 20,000 push notifications to our users.

Describe the solution you'd like
FCM documentation recommends retrying such requests. https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/send-message#admin.

Currently, the library retries 503 requests but not 500 (messaging/internal-error returns 500) https://github.com/firebase/firebase-admin-node/blob/b5c4f5ae551249b64632baf2ece7b5c594a1965f/src/utils/api-request.ts#L202

It would be nice to change the default retry configuration or allow library users to use their own retry configs. It seems the solution is already implemented in https://github.com/firebase/firebase-admin-node/pull/1739 but stuck in review phase for 2 years.

Describe alternatives you've considered
I considered writing a custom wrapper around the FCM error, but it appears that FCM doesn't expose the Retry-After header, making it unclear how long the wrapper should wait before making another request.

Additionally, copying and pasting the same wrapper in each project that uses FCM is a very frustrating experience

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
1.7k
Forks
419
Avg merge
4d 20h
Merged PRs (30d)
16

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