Accessing Node Logs

Question

I used the one click installer to create a Node.js app. The "hello world" that is created with the installer worked fine but I'm not able to get the app I've been working on to work on the site (it's been working locally with no problem but on the site I get a page that says "Not implemented").

There's some console.log statements that I've put in the app to debug it but whenever I run the start script from the shell I don't see any statements appear. So where are console.log statements for an app supposed to appear?

Accepted Answer

console.log() goes to stdout, and console.error() goes to stderr.

Unfortunately, as it stands right now, both of those streams are discarded. A "start" script via the one-click installer has a line that looks like this:

nohup /home/username/webapps/appname/bin/node /home/username/webapps/appname/app.js > /dev/null 2>&1 &

nohup discards output anyway, so everything is sent straight to /dev/null. This means that most people using node via our one-click installers do not use console.log or console.error for debugging. Instead, you would create a function which appends to a log file using file I/O, and that file can be created anywhere you like.

For instance:

var fs = require('fs');
var log = function(msg) {
    fs.appendFileSync('/home/username/webapps/appname/debug.log', msg + '\n');
};

Then, you can just log("something");

Hope that helps!

Accessing Node Logs

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