Configure Node.js to log to a file instead of the console

Can I configure console.log so that the logs are written on a file instead of being printed in the console?

Solution 1:

You could also just overload the default console.log function:

var fs = require('fs');
var util = require('util');
var log_file = fs.createWriteStream(__dirname + '/debug.log', {flags : 'w'});
var log_stdout = process.stdout;

console.log = function(d) { //
  log_file.write(util.format(d) + '\n');
  log_stdout.write(util.format(d) + '\n');
};

Above example will log to debug.log and stdout.

Edit: See multiparameter version by Clément also on this page.

Solution 2:

Update 2013 - This was written around Node v0.2 and v0.4; There are much better utilites now around logging. I highly recommend Winston

Update Late 2013 - We still use winston, but now with a logger library to wrap the functionality around logging of custom objects and formatting. Here is a sample of our logger.js https://gist.github.com/rtgibbons/7354879

Should be as simple as this.

var access = fs.createWriteStream(dir + '/node.access.log', { flags: 'a' })
      , error = fs.createWriteStream(dir + '/node.error.log', { flags: 'a' });

// redirect stdout / stderr
proc.stdout.pipe(access);
proc.stderr.pipe(error);

Solution 3:

If you are looking for something in production winston is probably the best choice.

If you just want to do dev stuff quickly, output directly to a file (I think this works only for *nix systems):

nohup node simple-server.js > output.log &

Solution 4:

I often use many arguments to console.log() and console.error(), so my solution would be:

var fs = require('fs');
var util = require('util');
var logFile = fs.createWriteStream('log.txt', { flags: 'a' });
  // Or 'w' to truncate the file every time the process starts.
var logStdout = process.stdout;

console.log = function () {
  logFile.write(util.format.apply(null, arguments) + '\n');
  logStdout.write(util.format.apply(null, arguments) + '\n');
}
console.error = console.log;

Solution 5:

Winston is a very-popular npm-module used for logging.

Here is a how-to.
Install winston in your project as:

npm install winston --save

Here's a configuration ready to use out-of-box that I use frequently in my projects as logger.js under utils.

 /**
 * Configurations of logger.
 */
const winston = require('winston');
const winstonRotator = require('winston-daily-rotate-file');

const consoleConfig = [
  new winston.transports.Console({
    'colorize': true
  })
];

const createLogger = new winston.Logger({
  'transports': consoleConfig
});

const successLogger = createLogger;
successLogger.add(winstonRotator, {
  'name': 'access-file',
  'level': 'info',
  'filename': './logs/access.log',
  'json': false,
  'datePattern': 'yyyy-MM-dd-',
  'prepend': true
});

const errorLogger = createLogger;
errorLogger.add(winstonRotator, {
  'name': 'error-file',
  'level': 'error',
  'filename': './logs/error.log',
  'json': false,
  'datePattern': 'yyyy-MM-dd-',
  'prepend': true
});

module.exports = {
  'successlog': successLogger,
  'errorlog': errorLogger
};

And then simply import wherever required as this:

const errorLog = require('../util/logger').errorlog;
const successlog = require('../util/logger').successlog;

Then you can log the success as:

successlog.info(`Success Message and variables: ${variable}`);

and Errors as:

errorlog.error(`Error Message : ${error}`);

It also logs all the success-logs and error-logs in a file under logs directory date-wise as you can see here.
log direcotry