nodeshift/opossum

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1680 stars · 112 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Opossum is a Node.js circuit breaker library that wraps asynchronous functions (promises and callbacks) and monitors their execution, failing fast when error thresholds are exceeded. It supports timeouts, fallback functions, AbortController-based cancellation, caching, health checks, and event-based status monitoring.

Use cases

• prevent cascading failures when calling unreliable network services
• fail fast instead of hanging on slow HTTP requests
• provide fallback responses when a dependency is down
• add timeouts and automatic circuit tripping to async calls
• monitor failure rates of external API calls
• implement the circuit breaker pattern in Node.js microservices

When to choose

• you need a battle-tested, actively maintained circuit breaker for Node.js promises
• you want Hystrix-style resilience with fallbacks and health checks
• you need AbortController support to cancel in-flight requests on timeout

When to avoid

• you are not on Node.js (it requires Node >= 22 in recent versions)
• you need client-side or browser circuit breaking
• you want a full service mesh or proxy-level resilience solution rather than a library

Facets

library · maturity active

rate-limiting middleware error-handling backend developer-tools apis microservices circuit-breaker fail-fast hystrix resilience fallback promises fault-tolerance nodejs

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