Log2response

Log2response is a tool (express middleware) that provides simple API to send your request-based logs directly into browser console. Its not a complex log utility, so you probably should use it with your main tool like [bunyan] as a transport

Features

• All request-based logs in your developer's console
• Colored output
• Callbacks that will help you to customize output, e.g. if color depends of content
• Easy to use with another log utility

Installition

npm install --save-dev express-log2response

Usage

First, execute as a middleware:

app.use(require('express-log2response')(options));

You can specify next options. All of these is not required:

Option	Type	Example
css	string	background: #222; color: lightgreen
Default css that will be used for browser console output. Defaults to example value
logCallback	function(log)	function(log) { if(log.input.level == 'error') log.css = 'color: red'; log.input = log.input.msg; }
Function that will be called for each log item before sending to browser. Argument log has two fields: input - res.log input, css - style of input. You may change this values for changing input value (e.g. using object field instead of whole log object) or changing item's style (e.g. mark different log levels with different colors)
sendCallback	function(req, res)	function(req, res) { res.log('beforeSend'); }
Function that will be called right before calling res.send. Arguments are req and res objects

Next, you can use res.log(input) in your application and then logs will be sent to browser console with calling res.send or res.render. Note that log will be sent to browser ONLY if content type is html. So don't worry about breaking your JSON or smth.

Using with main log utility

All you need is your request-based log utility must have access to res.log. So you can specify res.log function as a one of destination functions (or streams) of main utility.

Example for [bunyan]:

req.log = bunyan.createLogger({
    name: 'REQ',
    streams: [
        ...
        {
            level: 'debug',
            stream: {write: res.log},
            type: 'raw'
        }
        ...
    ]
});
...
app.get('/', function(req, res, next) {
    req.log.debug('This log will be sent in browser console!');
}

So all you need to do is send all your logs to res.log.

If your main log utility is not much flexible, you can write custom fucntion that will send logs to each destination. Example:

res.l = function() {
    this.log(arguments);
    req.anotherLogTool(arguments);
}

Minimal example application

index.js:

var express = require('express');
var app = express();

app.use(require('express-log2response')());
app.get('/', function(req, res, next){
    res.log('Requset path is ' + req.path);
    res.send('alloha');
});
app.listen(3001);

Run nodejs index.js and go to http://localhost:3001 [bunyan]:https://github.com/trentm/node-bunyan