"getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND" error

[tyleri]

I recently came across this issue when using request-promise-native. When sending a GET or POST request to certain URLs, I received a "getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND" error. This seems to happen randomly (i.e. some URL requests would throw this error during one run but work completely fine on the next). After some Googling, I found this issue:

nodejs/node#5436 (comment)

Although I didn't find this documented in the request-promise page, I added {"family": 4} to the options, and I stopped getting the error. It might be useful to either set "family" to 4 by default or just make a note of this in the documentation.

[analog-nico]

Thank you @tyleri , this is an immensely useful tweak!

I wouldn't set this option by default because of the unwanted effects it may cause for existing request-promise / request-promise-native users. However, I'll add this to the docs. Maybe a "troubleshooting" section would make sense.

I'll keep this issue open until I updated the docs.

[olexme]

I have similar issue. I get the err like below (theurl.com is a placeholder) after a few hours of request-promise package usage and hundreds of requests pointing the same 'theurl.com' url. Not sure if it is caused by temporary DNS issue but at some point the package starts throwing errors like below. At that time 'dig theurl.com' resolves url properly, but the lib got stuck after first err and the only option is to restart the node, which helps. I will try to add static url to /etc/hosts first then I will check that {"family": 4} option.

Some details:
System: os X sierra
Node: v5.10.1
request-promise v4.1.1
Request options:
{
 followRedirect: false,

uri: “https://theurl.com/apath”,

qs: {
 goto: “https://ok.path.com”,

gotoOnFail: “https://fail.path.com”,
 },

json: true 
}

Error:
{ [RequestError: Error: getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND theurl.com theurl.com:443]
name: 'RequestError',
message: 'Error: getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND theurl.com theurl.com:443',
cause:
{ [Error: getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND theurl.com theurl.com:443]
code: 'ENOTFOUND',
errno: 'ENOTFOUND',
syscall: 'getaddrinfo',
hostname: 'theurl.com',
host: 'theurl.com',
port: 443 },

[analog-nico]

Hi @olexme , the issue you are facing is very low level. request-promise uses request and request uses node's core libraries. The error is thrown by the core libraries. { family: 4 } may help but in your case – since you are requesting the same server over and over again – you may also look into DNS caching. Read the full discussion in this issue to get a good understanding. Finally, since it is a node-level issue you may update to the latest LTS.

[kilianc]

@tyleri like this?

require('request-promise-native').defaults({ family: 4 })

[tyleri]

@kilianc
I didn't do it that way, but that might work.
I just followed the example here, but added "family: 4" to the options:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/request-promise#post-data-to-a-json-rest-api

[kilianc]

I couldn't find any reference in the request source code to a family property. I will give this a try, thanks @tyleri

[tyleri]

Yes, as mentioned above, it is not documented in request-promise. It seems to be a property of the underlying Node.js libraries that request-promise uses.

[kilianc]

@tyleri so it's a pass through property that's why I couldn't find it.