Console.log debug messages managing

Question

My JS code is usually full of console.log() debug messages. Sometimes it is better to turn them off, or to turn off some part of them.

I can, for example, wrap console.log() statement in some function with conditions which are defined by some constants. Is it the best way to manage debug output or are more elegant alternatives?

Answer 1

Bunyan logging module is popular for node.js

Example code hi.js:

var bunyan = require('bunyan');
var log = bunyan.createLogger({name: 'myapp'});
log.info('hi');
log.warn({lang: 'fr'}, 'au revoir');

Output:

{"name":"myapp","hostname":"localhost","pid":40161,"level":30,"msg":"hi","time":"2013-01-    04T18:46:23.851Z","v":0}
{"name":"myapp","hostname":"localhost","pid":40161,"level":40,"lang":"fr","msg":"au revoir","time":"2013-01-04T18:46:23.853Z","v":0}

You can then filtering from command lines:

$ node hi.js | bunyan -l warn
[2013-01-04T19:08:37.182Z]  WARN: myapp/40353 on localhost: au revoir (lang=fr)

Answer 2

Wrapping console.log into a function works well. But notice that there are also a lot of logging utilities out there for javascript. A little google on "js logger" may yield suitable results.