minilog

Remote logging

Good practices

• Do not make a REST call for every line, instead, batch the calls over some time (e.g. 5-30 seconds of logs at a time)
• Use JSON for all your logs. Newline-separated JSON is a decent default format.
• Add metadata on the server side:
  • current time
  • client session (e.g. a random id)
  • other metadata (e.g. client account)
• If you want to machine-parse your logs or run analytics on them, you might want to log everything as a single object {} with different keys.
• Wait until jQuery is loaded via .jQueryWait

For example, use "op" / "event" with a human-legible description, and separate the parameters of the operation:

{
  "op": "publish",
  "value": "Hello world",
  "to": "user/1"
}

which is close enough to be user-readable.

Logging as JSON over a remote connection

One way to do this is to use the jQuery backend, which provides a bit more robustness. You need a server that receives the POST request and appends the log lines to a file (log lines are passed as an array):

And then, you'd configure Minilog something like this (with a filter that takes all logs from "foo" and "bar" that are not "debug" level):

AjaxLogger.jQueryWait(
  // ...
);

;(function() {
  Minilog
    // allow when the name matches foo or bar, and level >= debug
    // remove the line to pipe all log lines
    .pipe(new Minilog.Filter().allow(/^(foo|bar).*/, 'debug'))
    .pipe(new Minilog.backends.jQuery({
      url: 'http://localhost:8080/log',
      interval: 5000
      }));
}());

Writing Node backends

When running in Node, you should use the Stringify formatter, since internally the streams have a richer signature which makes things easier to express:

write(name, level, args)

but Node's streams want strings:

write(chunk, [encoding], [callback])

Minilog v1 automatically stringified inputs, but this made the experience much worse in all cases other than where you were piping to a disk since the streams then needed to re-parse the chunks.

To use external APIs which expect .write(str), use the Stringifier formatter first:

Minilog.pipe(new Minilog.Stringifier()).pipe(process.stdout);