Express Morgan not writing logs to file or STDOUT

Question

I have an Express application that I would like to add logging to. I installed Morgan and set up the middleware in the file which manages my API calls:

/src/api/calls.js

the morgan middleware is set up to send the logging results to a file: errors.txt

    var express = require('express'),
        app = express(),
        dbConfig = require('../config/db.config'),
        connectToMongo = require('./db.js'),
        bodyParser = require("body-parser"),
        ObjectId = require('mongodb').ObjectID,
        morgan = require('morgan'),
        fs = require('fs'),
        Sb;

    //middleware
    var accessLogStream = fs.createWriteStream('../sample/errors.txt', {flags: 'a'})
    app.use(morgan('combined',  {stream: accessLogStream}));

    app.use(function(req, res, next) {
      res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");
      res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept");
      next();
    });
    app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));

module.exports = function apiRoutes(app) {
  app.get("/v1/api/sample/:call", function(req, res, next) {
     //route db calls and code here
  });
}

/app.js

the api routes are required into the app.js file and the apiRoutes function is called:

var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var config = require('./src/config/server.config');
//api and server
var http = require('http');
var server = new http.Server(app);

//load the api calls for the server
var apiRoutes = require('./src/api/calls.js');
apiRoutes(app);

the problem is - I'm not getting any logging data written into my errors.txt file or even in the console when I change the code to simply STDOUT. What am I missing here?

Answer 1

I figured it out- the logging code needed to be located in the app.js file, not in the file that holds the api calls. I knew the logging code needed to be the first piece of middleware, but I didn't realize it needed to be right after the new instance of the server is instantiated.

var express = require('express'),
    app = express(),
    config = require('./src/config/server.config'),
    morgan = require('morgan'),
    fs = require('fs'),
//api and server
    http = require('http'),
    server = new http.Server(app); 

//set up the logger
var accessLogStream = fs.createWriteStream(__dirname + '/access.log', {flags: 'a'})
app.use(morgan('combined',  {"stream": accessLogStream}));


//load the api calls for the server
var apiRoutes = require('./src/api/calls.js');
apiRoutes(app);