[Proposal] Circuit Breaker for HTTP Client

[joy-deploy]

Hey everyone,

I'd like to propose adding an optional circuit breaker to the HTTP client.

The problem is simple: when an external API goes down, retry() keeps sending requests to it. Each one waits for the timeout, workers stack up, and the failing service ends up affecting unrelated parts of your app.

A circuit breaker counts recent failures for a given service. After a threshold it stops making requests and throws immediately. After a cooldown it lets one request through to test if the service is back.

Other frameworks have this built in (Resilience4j, Polly, gobreaker). I think it fits naturally in Laravel's HTTP client next to retry() and timeout().

Http::withCircuitBreaker('stripe')
    ->post('https://api.stripe.com/charges', $payload);

Http::withCircuitBreaker('stripe',
    maxFailures: 5,
    decaySeconds: 60,
    recoverySeconds: 30,
)->post(...);

// works with retry, breaker checked per attempt
Http::withCircuitBreaker('stripe')
    ->retry(3, 100)
    ->post(...);

I have the implementation ready, about 100 lines. Failure counting goes through RateLimiter::hit() for atomic increments. Half-open probe locking uses Cache::lock() like the scheduler does with withoutOverlapping. If cache is down it fails open.

Trips on 5xx and ConnectionException by default, not 4xx. There's a whenFailed callback for custom logic.

Scope is intentionally small. No sliding windows or error-rate calculations, just a counter with time decay like RateLimiter.

Anyone else running into this? How are you handling it? Happy to put up a PR if there's interest.