I spent two days refactoring our 'logging' system. It was broken because of a poor override of the default console object.
So now, we're using log4js-node as the logging framework and it works great! When I chose log4js, I thought it was more actively maintained than the venerable winston. It turned out this is not the case. Both are very similar and pretty neat.
The goal is to have our console message sent to the system syslog. In amazon cloud, we're using loggly to get these logs. Anyway, as soon as there is more than one server involved, one has to think how to get all of these logs in place. And the rsyslog system works pretty well. Fortunately, there is already an appender using ain2: log4js-ain2.
On ubuntu, there is a few configurations from the default to enable this though. The config file is in /etc/rsyslog.conf.
One has to uncomment the following lines:
$ModLoad imudp
$UDPServerRun 514
#...
$ModLoad imtcp
$InputTCPServerRun 514
and restart: sudo /etc/init.d/rsyslog restart the service.
Also, by default, rsyslog transform weird characters (ASCII<32) so the output is on one line. Example:
Feb 26 08:03:37 greg-Desktop /home/greg/projects/log4js-ain2/node_modules/ain2/index.js[11274]: [default] - [Error: BOOM]#012Error: BOOM#012 at Object.<anonymous> (/home/greg/tests/log4jsTest/index.js:44:14)#012 at Module._compile (module.js:456:26)#012 at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:474:10)#012 at Module.load (module.js:356:32)#012 at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12)#012 at Function.Module.runMain (module.js:497:10)#012 at startup (node.js:119:16)#012 at node.js:902:3
To fix that and get more readable messages, still in the same file:
#
# Don't escape ASCII<32 characters (newlines and tabs)
#
$EscapeControlCharactersOnReceive off
and after a restart:
Feb 26 08:03:25 greg-DigbilDesktop /home/greg/projects/log4js-ain2/node_modules/ain2/index.js[11231]: [default] - [Error: BOOM]
Error: BOOM
at Object.<anonymous> (/home/greg/tests/log4jsTest/index.js:44:14)
at Module._compile (module.js:456:26)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:474:10)
at Module.load (module.js:356:32)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12)
at Function.Module.runMain (module.js:497:10)
at startup (node.js:119:16)
at node.js:902:3
Which is much better.