How do I see the logs of all my sessions easily?

[smashah]

In version 4.27.9, the first iteration of integrated winston-js logging was released.

This new logging allows you to send logs to a rotating file, the console or a Syslog transport. (A transport is basically winston-speak for any destination for logs).

The logger, which can be imported as log, also features automatic sensitive data redacting and string truncating.

The redaction is useful to prevent sessionData strings from being leaked in logging transports.

Truncating is useful to prevent log files, and external logging services, from being filled with DataURLs/DataURIs, base64 strings or long message strings. Long strings in logs can result in memory leaks in some services.

How to

In the below examples, we are going to set up the logs to:

1. Save to a rotating file
2. Show up in papertrail (a centralized cloud logging service)
3. Print to the terminal

In code:

Background

Logging can be set up via the config via config.logging which is just an array of ConfigLogTransport objects. ConfigLogTransport has two properties type and options.

type can only be console, file or syslog. options is optional and only really required on syslog transports, however you can override existing file and console transport defaults via the options property.

file rotate defaults
console defaults

...

create({
	...
	"logging": [
		{
			//Log to a rotating file, 
			"type": "file"
		},
		{
			//Print logs to the console
			"type": "console"
		},
		{
			//Send logs to papertrail.
			//You can get these details after signing up to papertrail
			"type": "syslog"
			"options": {
        		"host": "logs2.papertrailapp.com",
        		"port": 12345,
        		"protocol": "tls4",
        		"eol": "\n"
			}
		}
	]
})

That's it. With that config you can now have three destinations for your logs.

You may find that your preferred logging service does not have a Syslog configuration. For these cases you can just add your desired transport manually. In the example below, you can add Google Cloud Platform Stackdriver as a transport:

//grab the main logger from open-wa
import { log, create } from '@open-wa/wa-automate'

//set up the gcp Transport
import { LoggingWinston } from '@google-cloud/logging-winston';
const gcpTransport = new LoggingWinston({
    projectId: 'your-project-id',
    keyFilename: '/path/to/keyfile.json'
  });

...
//add the transport to the logger
log.add(
 gcpTransport
)

...
//now you can start your session

create()

EASY API/CLI (npx @open-wa/wa-automate ...)

The easy api has some limitations compared to the native code examples above. One such limitation is that you cannot add custom transports as shown with the GCP stackdriver transports. Luckily, most third party transports are migrating to use Syslog. If you have a preference for a custom logging transport not supported by syslog then feel free to make an issue for adding it as a built-in transport wa-automate and we will consider it if there is enough community demand.

If you want to make use of logging in the cli you will have to create a file called cli.config.json in your process working directory (the folder in which you run the npx ... command. This special json file is picked up and parsed automatically by the CLI. It is a convenient alternative to CLI flags/options.

Your cli.config.json will look the same as the config in the in code example above:

cli.config.json

{
	...
	"logging": [
		{
			//Log to a rotating file, 
			"type": "file"
		},
		{
			//Print logs to the console
			"type: "console"
		},
		{
			//Send logs to papertrail.
			//You can get these details after signing up to papertrail
			"type": "syslog"
			"options: {
        		"host": "logs2.papertrailapp.com",
        		"port": 12345,
        		"protocol": "tls4",
        		"eol": "\n"
			}
		}
	]
}

and that's it. Your easy api will now reliably print verbose logs to the console, send them to papertrail and maintain a rolling log file WHICH WILL BE SUPER USEFUL WHEN DEBUGGING ISSUES :)

Enjoy!

[smashah]

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