Logdog

A simple module for logging and alerting about spesific critical events inside your app for further inspection by a developer.

Writes log messages to std.out or std.err.

Supports notifying a Slack channel (fully optional).

Disclaimer

Logdog is not meant to be your application logger or debugger! It's a tool for logging spesific events in your app, and let someone know about it (it may not even be a developer). Logdog's barks let you know something is wrong without looking at exceptions, stacktraces and stuff like that. It's a call to actions for further debugging / log file inspection by a developer.

Usage

Install

npm install logdog

Initialization and configuration

Logdog is first initialized in your app by requiring it and passing configuration options for it:

  var logDog = require('logdog')(...config);

Next time you require it, you will get the singleton instance of the first require, so you don't need to configure Logdog all over the place.

Another place in the code (call without any options):

var logDog = require('logdog')();

Logdog is now configured with options from the first initial require statement.

Log something

  logDog('myApp.myFeature').bark('Winter is coming!');

The function parameter to logDog is the prefix for the log line, indicating where in the application/script the event occurred.

Then we call .bark(message) to assign the actual log message.

If we want, we may put it on Slack too:

  logDog('myApp.myFeature').bark('Winter is coming!').toSlack({notify: '@jon'});

Configuration options

• prefix String to prefix any log messages with. Default is logdog.

• bindTo By default Logdog.bark goes to sdt.err. Value stdout will bind it to std.out. Value null will disable any output (i.e. for only sending to slack).

• slack

  The slack property is a hash of the following keys:

  • url: Required. I.e. 'https://hooks.slack.com/services/XXX/YYY/abc'
  • channel: Required. I.e. '#appNotifications'
  • username: Optional. Defaults to 'LogDog'.
  • emoji: Optional. An emoticon associated with the message. Defaults to '🐶',
  • notify: Optional. Slack username(s) to notify. I.e. '@jon' or ['@jon', '@samwell'].

Examples:

Simple log to std.err

  var logDog = require('logdog')();
  logDog('myapp.myfeature').bark("Something went so wrong!");

Simple log to std.out

  var logDog = require('logdog')({bindToStdOut: true});
  logDog('myapp.myfeature').bark("Did something of importance!");

Log and send to Slack

  var logDog = require('logdog')({
    slack: {
      url: 'https://hooks.slack.com/services/XXX/YYY/abc',
      channel: '#appNotifications'
    }
  });

  logDog('myapp.myfeature')
    .bark("Did something of importance!")
    .toSlack()

Log, send to Slack and override previously configured Slack options:

  logDog('myapp.myfeature')
    .bark("Something went horribly wrong!")
    .toSlack({emoji: ':heavy_exclamation_mark:', notify: '@myusername'})