jackwener/OpenCLI · warning · EmptyResultError

crates crate

Error message

crates crate

What it means

The 'crates crate' EmptyResultError is thrown by the crates.io 'crate' subcommand when crates.io responds successfully but contains no crate metadata (body.crate missing or lacking an id), or upstream returns 404 via cratesFetch. It signals 'valid request, no data' rather than a transport failure.

Source

Thrown at clis/crates/crate.js:31

    name: 'crate',
    access: 'read',
    description: 'Single crates.io crate metadata (latest version, downloads, license, repo)',
    domain: 'crates.io',
    strategy: Strategy.PUBLIC,
    browser: false,
    args: [
        { name: 'name', positional: true, required: true, help: 'crates.io crate name (e.g. "serde", "tokio")' },
    ],
    columns: [
        'name', 'latestVersion', 'description', 'downloads', 'recentDownloads', 'versions',
        'license', 'homepage', 'documentation', 'repository', 'keywords', 'categories', 'created', 'updated', 'url',
    ],
    func: async (args) => {
        const name = requireCrateName(args.name);
        const body = await cratesFetch(`${CRATES_BASE}/api/v1/crates/${encodeURIComponent(name)}`, `crates crate ${name}`);
        const c = body?.crate;
        if (!c || !c.id) {
            throw new EmptyResultError('crates crate', `crates.io returned no metadata for "${name}".`);
        }
        const versions = Array.isArray(body.versions) ? body.versions : [];
        const latestRow = versions.find((v) => v.num === c.newest_version)
            || versions.find((v) => v.num === c.max_stable_version)
            || versions[0]
            || {};
        const keywords = Array.isArray(body.keywords)
            ? body.keywords.map((k) => k?.keyword || k?.id || '').filter(Boolean).join(', ')
            : '';
        const categories = Array.isArray(body.categories)
            ? body.categories.map((cat) => cat?.category || cat?.slug || '').filter(Boolean).join(', ')
            : '';
        return [{
            name: String(c.name ?? c.id),
            latestVersion: String(c.newest_version ?? c.max_stable_version ?? c.max_version ?? ''),
            description: String(c.description ?? '').trim(),
            downloads: c.downloads != null ? Number(c.downloads) : null,
            recentDownloads: c.recent_downloads != null ? Number(c.recent_downloads) : null,

View on GitHub (pinned to 49907e53dc)

Solutions

  1. Check the crate name spelling against crates.io in a browser.
  2. Search first with `crates search <term>` to find the exact crate name, then re-run `crates crate <name>`.
  3. Retry later if crates.io is degraded; the empty body may be transient.
  4. Catch EmptyResultError in your tooling and show a 'not found' message instead of crashing.

Example fix

// before
const info = await cli.crates.crate({ name: 'tokyio' });
// after
const info = await cli.crates.crate({ name: 'tokio' }); // or search first:
const hits = await cli.crates.search({ query: 'tokio' });
Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Validate before calling

if (!/^[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_-]{0,63}$/.test(name ?? '')) {
  throw new Error(`"${name}" does not look like a crates.io crate name`);
}

Type guard

function isPlausibleCrateName(v) {
  return typeof v === 'string' && /^[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_-]{0,63}$/.test(v.trim());
}

Try / catch

try {
  const info = await cli.crates.crate({ name });
} catch (e) {
  if (e instanceof EmptyResultError) {
    console.warn(`Crate "${name}" not found on crates.io; try 'crates search'.`);
    return null;
  }
  throw e;
}

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: Running `crates crate <name>` where the name does not exist on crates.io (cratesFetch maps the 404 to EmptyResultError), or crates.io returns 200 with unexpected/empty JSON so body?.crate is undefined.

Common situations: Typo in the crate name ('tokyio' instead of 'tokio'), a private/removed/yanked-only crate, a name that was never published, or a crates.io API schema change that temporarily breaks the response shape.

Understand the failure class

Background: EmptyResultError / "no results found": when an API or scraper succeeds but returns zero rows — this error's family across 9 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of jackwener/OpenCLI@49907e53dc (2026-08-29). Data as JSON: /api/errors/673985d768dd5a97. Report an issue: GitHub.