How do you handle errors in LangGraph?

Error handling in LangGraph is explicit — errors in nodes are not automatically caught or retried. If a node raises an unhandled exception, the graph execution stops and the exception propagates to the caller. This is intentional: LangGraph wants you to be explicit about failure modes rather than silently swallowing errors.

Approach 1: try/except inside node functions — the most common pattern. Catch the error, add a diagnostic message to state, and route to an error-recovery node:

def call_tool(state: AgentState) -> dict:
    try:
        result = tool.invoke(state["tool_input"])
        return {"messages": [ToolMessage(content=result, ...)]}
    except Exception as e:
        return {"messages": [ToolMessage(content=f"Error: {e}", ...)]}

Approach 2: error recovery edges — route to a dedicated error handler node using a conditional edge that inspects whether the last message signals an error:

def should_retry(state) -> str:
    last = state["messages"][-1].content
    if last.startswith("Error:"):
        return "error_handler"
    return "continue"

graph.add_conditional_edges("tool_node", should_retry, {"error_handler": "error_handler", "continue": "agent"})

For transient external service errors (rate limits, timeouts), wrap the relevant LangChain component with .with_retry() before using it inside a node.

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