winston-testified-console

Configures Winston’s Console transport to send all log messages to stderr to keep test output clean.

Introduction

Good logging is an invaluable mechanism for many software projects, especially those intended to run as local or network services. And increasingly, as technologies like Docker gain in popularity, those messages are commonly sent to the console, rather than to some file.

Automated testing suites are another invaluable mechanism of modern software projects.

But when your software logs to the console, the "noise" from its messages can make your test output difficult to read—particularly if you develop with a watch set up that automatically runs your tests each time you modify one of your source files.

But if you could get all your logging messages to write to stderr, you'd be able to enjoy clean test output by running the tests with a command like this:

# capture log messages to a file 
$ npm test 2>./messages.log
 
# discard log messages entirely 
$ npm test 2>/dev/null

And that's what I've designed this package to do for your project's tests. (That is, assuming your project uses Winston for its logging. 😉)

Getting Started

First off, this is , you'll naturally want to add the package to your project:

$ npm i --save-dev winston-testified-console

Assuming your project's test suite already has a "bootstrap" script (if not, and you don't know how to set this up, see here), add the following line amongst its require statements:

require('winston-testified-console')();

And run your tests, sending stderr to /dev/null:

$ env NODE_ENV=testing npm test 2>/dev/null

That was easy, right? At least in theory; your project will likely require a bit more work to get set up, so let's take it from the top.

Configuring Testify

The more complex your project is, the likelier you'll need to do a bit of configuring. The winston-testified-console supports two optional arguments:

• target, which references what to "testify" console output for. This can be a winston.Logger instance, a winston.Container instance, an array of instance of either type (can be uniform or a mix), and the winston instance itself (default value).

• isTesting, which is a callback that should return true whenever console output ought to be "testified". The default callback evaulates to true when the NODE_ENV environment variable matches /^test/ (e.g., test, tests, testing, etc).

require('winston-testified-console')(logger, isTestingCb);