Improve the logging experience

[Tobbe]

There are two main libraries used for logging in Node, pino, that Cedar already uses, and winston

They say pino is the most performant (least overhead). And it fits very well with Fastify which we already use too. Both Pino and Fastify are written by Matteo Collina, who is obviously very talented.

I just don't like the API/DX very much of Pino 🙈 Winston looks much nicer! What I want is something that looks and feels like console.log. So I for example can do this

const name = 'Joe'
const age = 47
const infoObject = {
  sex: 'male',
  shoeSize: 9,
  children: 2,
}

logger.debug('My name is', name, 'and I am', age, 'years old. And here's some more info about me:', infoObject)

And have it printed to the terminal/browser console just as nicely as console.log would have (e.g. not doing String(infoObject))

I'm also thinking maybe Cedar could ship with a log viewer

There's this (Winston) https://github.com/errsole/errsole.js
And this (pino) https://pinorama.dev
There's also https://github.com/cabinjs/cabin that I like mostly because it's forest theme that goes very well with Cedar 🌲

The Cabin team also have https://github.com/cabinjs/axe/ which normalizes logging and works with Pino. I don't like everything they do, so I don't think I want to use it as-is. But maybe I can get some inspiration for how to bend Pino to my will.
And speaking of bending Pino, I also found this article: https://dev.to/vbarzana/enhancing-pino-to-support-message-payload-logging-without-breaking-pretty-logs-2hjb

[enisdenjo]

Hey there! Stumbled upon this issue here and wanted to quickly mention Hive Logger, it is designed to work seamlessly in all JavaScript environments, including Node.js, browsers, and serverless platforms; improve ergonomics and solve real-world painpoints like lazy arguments, custom log writers, advanced serialisation (with class props support), dynamic log level switching - just to name a few.

We did base it on pino (😬) when designing the log styles, we liked, and got used to, the:

log.info({ my: 'attrs' }, 'Hello World!')

because the metadata is right there, as the most important part of the log message.

However, we had some discussions on supporting console.log ergonomics - which is possible, but not done...

At the moment, integrated in Hive Gateway only (Yoga is coming soon).

Am curious about your thoughts on it? It's a recent project and we are open to suggestions to maximising the DX of it!

P.S. It supports the winston writer (among others). 😄

import winston from 'winston'
import { Logger } from '@graphql-hive/logger'
import { WinstonLogWriter } from '@graphql-hive/logger/writers/winston'
 
const winstonLogger = winston.createLogger({
  transports: [new winston.transports.Console()]
})
 
const log = new Logger({ writers: [new WinstonLogWriter(winstonLogger)] })
 
log.info({ some: 'attributes' }, 'hello world')

[Tobbe]

@enisdenjo So happy to see you here! Where can we best chat about this in realtime?