Using console.log() in Electron app

Question

console.log works, but where it logs to depends on whether you call it from the main process or the renderer process.

If you call it from the renderer process (i.e. JavaScript that is included from your index.html file) it will be logged to the dev tools window.

If you call it from the main process (i.e. in main.js) it will work the same way as it does in Node - it will log to the terminal window. If you're starting your Electron process from the Terminal using electron . you can see your console.log calls from the main process there.

You can also add an environment variable in windows:

ELECTRON_ENABLE_LOGGING=1

This will output console messages to your terminal.

There is another way of logging to the console from inside the renderer process. Given this is Electron, you can access Node's native modules. This includes the console module.

var nodeConsole = require('console');
var myConsole = new nodeConsole.Console(process.stdout, process.stderr);
myConsole.log('Hello World!');

When this code is run from inside the renderer process, you will get Hello World! in the terminal you ran Electron from.

See https://nodejs.org/api/console.html for further documentation on the console module.

Yet another possibility is accessing the main process console using remote.getGlobal(name):

const con = require('electron').remote.getGlobal('console')
con.log('This will be output to the main process console.')

Adding to M. Damian's answer, here's how I set it up so I could access the main process's console from any renderer.

In your main app, add:

const electron = require('electron');
const app = electron.app;
const console = require('console');
...
app.console = new console.Console(process.stdout, process.stderr);

In any renderer, you can add:

const remote = require('electron').remote;
const app = remote.app;
...
app.console.log('This will output to the main process console.');

process.stdout.write('your output to command prompt console or node js ')

You can use the npm package electron-log https://www.npmjs.com/package/electron-log

It will log your error, warn, info, verbose, debug, silly outputs in your native os log.

var log = require('electron-log');

log.info('Hello, log');
log.error('Damn it, an error');