Use rescue() to Prevent Small Failures from Breaking Your Laravel App

🚀 The Real Problem

In real projects, we often call code that might fail:

• External API calls
• File operations
• Optional database records
• Third-party packages

Usually, we write this:

try {
    $data = riskyOperation();
} catch (\Exception $e) {
    $data = null;
}

It works — but it’s repetitive and ugly.

Laravel gives you a cleaner solution.

🎯 The Laravel Way: rescue()

$data = rescue(fn () => riskyOperation());

That’s it.

If an exception occurs:

• Laravel catches it
• Returns null instead of crashing

🧠 Real-World Example: External API Call

$response = rescue(function () {
    return Http::get('https://api.example.com/data')->json();
});

If the API:

• is down
• times out
• returns an error

Your app does not break.

🛒 Example: Optional File Read

$config = rescue(fn () => file_get_contents(storage_path('config.json')));

No file?

No crash.

Just null.

🏁 Final Thought

rescue() is perfect when:

• failure is acceptable
• data is optional
• you don’t want the app to crash
• you want clean, readable code

It replaces multiple try–catch blocks with one expressive helper.