Configure Node.js to log to a file instead of the console

Question

You could also just overload the default console.log function:

var fs = require('fs');
var util = require('util');
var log_file = fs.createWriteStream(__dirname + '/debug.log', {flags : 'w'});
var log_stdout = process.stdout;

console.log = function(d) { //
  log_file.write(util.format(d) + '\n');
  log_stdout.write(util.format(d) + '\n');
};

Above example will log to debug.log and stdout.

Edit: See multiparameter version by Clément also on this page.

Update 2013 - This was written around Node v0.2 and v0.4; There are much better utilites now around logging. I highly recommend Winston

Update Late 2013 - We still use winston, but now with a logger library to wrap the functionality around logging of custom objects and formatting. Here is a sample of our logger.js https://gist.github.com/rtgibbons/7354879

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Should be as simple as this.

var access = fs.createWriteStream(dir + '/node.access.log', { flags: 'a' })
      , error = fs.createWriteStream(dir + '/node.error.log', { flags: 'a' });

// redirect stdout / stderr
proc.stdout.pipe(access);
proc.stderr.pipe(error);

If you are looking for something in production winston is probably the best choice.

If you just want to do dev stuff quickly, output directly to a file (I think this works only for *nix systems):

nohup node simple-server.js > output.log &

I often use many arguments to console.log() and console.error(), so my solution would be:

var fs = require('fs');
var util = require('util');
var logFile = fs.createWriteStream('log.txt', { flags: 'a' });
  // Or 'w' to truncate the file every time the process starts.
var logStdout = process.stdout;

console.log = function () {
  logFile.write(util.format.apply(null, arguments) + '\n');
  logStdout.write(util.format.apply(null, arguments) + '\n');
}
console.error = console.log;