changed default stream to <<stdout+'\n'>>

[amitport]

changed to code so that the default stream is stdout with a line break at the end.
Before this change the default stream was stdout and the line break was hard-coded during the write operation.

This prevented using a custom streams which do not require or expect line breaks (e.g., winston transports)

[dougwilson]

Thanks! This is a good idea, but it is super breaking and will just have to wait for the next major. People are already passing in their own custom streams and expecting the newline to be at the end, which this removes.

[amitport]

if this is too much of a breaking change I have another suggestion:

1. add options.write- a function that receives a formatted log line and takes care of writing as it see fit
2. deprecate options.stream
3. deprecate options.buffer which is a concern of the log writing aspect, and should be handled by a specialized library (e.g., winston)
4. changed the code so that options.write will take precedence over options.stream when options.write is defined

[dougwilson]

deprecate options.buffer which is a concern of the log writing aspect, and should be handled by a specialized library (e.g., winston)

I agree and was already planning that :)

add options.write- a function that receives a formatted log line and takes care of writing as it see fit. deprecate options.stream

i think it should still be options.stream--stream is a universal interface in node.js and if you call it write, people will want to do {write: mystream.write} which would fail, since the context of the write function is lost; they have to remember to bind first, which is weird.

[amitport]

Having a direct write option is not very important, though I think is is reasonable to support both a direct function and an object by doing something like:

if (typeof options.stream.write !== 'function')
  options.stream  = {write: options.stream};

I any case, I think it is important to rename options.stream, deprecate the old one, and change the documentation. It will just to help people make a smoother transition.

how about options.out for a new name?

[dougwilson]

So after thinking on it, I'm going to close this. The reason is that this module creates text lines and streams them as a text stream. It sounds like you just want a stream of lines, rather than a stream of text. If you want your stream to be split on lines, simply pass in a stream that uses something like https://www.npmjs.org/package/split

[dougwilson]

Example:

var morgan = require('morgan')
var split = require('split')

var myStream = ... // your stream you want to get line events to

app.use(morgan({
  stream: split().pipe(myStream)
}))

[amitport]

FWIW I don't agree - the are use cases both ways
In my case, I'm using winston, and it just leaves me with a lot of boilerplate...

var morgan = require('morgan')
var split = require('split')
var winston = require("winston");
var winstonStream = require("winston-stream");
var log = winstonStream(winston, "info");

app.use(morgan({
  stream: split().pipe(log)
}))

[dougwilson]

OK, but the reverse is true for all the people who log to a file stream, then. We want no boilerplate for this pattern:

var fs= require('fs')
var morgan = require('morgan')

app.use(morgan({
  stream: fs.createWriteStream('access.log', {flags: 'a'})
}))

[dougwilson]

Also, your example it not useful, because the winston-stream library is stripping the newline we write, so I don't see the problem; you don't even need to use split with the winston-stream library...

var morgan = require('morgan')
var winston = require("winston");
var winstonStream = require("winston-stream");
var log = winstonStream(winston, "info");

app.use(morgan({
  stream: log
}))