Background

log4jesus is an attempt to write a 'logging library' that has all of the practical benefits of a much larger logging library, but with no dependencies, and in much fewer lines of code, without sacrificing features, by taking a straight-forward approach of solving the problem at hand, and no other problems. There is nothing in this 'library' that could be called a 'system' or 'framework'. Just a few functions that actually do the work required.

Usage

    const { log, logt } = require("./log4jesus");

log

send log data to targets tagged with 'all'

    log("use", ["exactly", "like"], `console.log ${420 * 69}`)

logt

send log data to only targets tagged with one of the tags in the array passed as a first arguement. first argument can be a string or array of strings.

    // send only to targets with the 'verbose' tag
    logt("verbose", "Download progress:", downloadProgress / totalDownloads);

    // send to targets with the 'info' and 'error' tags
    logt(["error", "info"], "failed to parse json at: ", filePath)

Configuration

log4jesus supports 3 types of targets for your log data:

• file
• console
• http

to determine what logs go to which target, edit the file log4jesus.json. there are three arrays defined in that file, associated with a key of either 'file', 'console' or 'http. in each case, the array should be an array of objects with a tags property (which should be a string or array of strings), as well as some other details about how this target should operate.

'file' details

• path: optional string to the file to create

'console' details

• stdstream: required value of 'stdout', 'stderr', or 'stdin'. It's not usually desired to make it 'stdin'.

'http' details

our http object is an extension of the nodejs http/https options object. The object is passed faithfully to http/s.request, so anything you add that is valid for http/s.request will be valid here.

Add a 'url' field to the object to specify the url for the request, which should include both the port and protocol - you usually won't need to set 'hostname' or 'host', or 'path' or 'port' or 'protocol'.

You may commonly have to set the 'headers' object, and the 'content-type' header inside of that object, depending on your server. If it's not provided it's set to 'text/plain'.

timestamps

all logs are prefixed with an ISO 8601 timestamp. You can change this easily by editing the timestamp function, but for now it is not configurable from the config file.

output formatting

by default, we format output using util.format, the same way console output is normally formatted. You can change this if you want by editing the formatOutput function, but for now it is not configurable from the config file.