winston saves color formatter in text, how to remove this but still show color?

Question

I am trying to create a logging module using winston as the logging framework. It allows me to specify colors, which is quite nice if the transport is Console, but if I were to define two transports, one Console, one File, it will actually save the terminal formatter string in the text, which will be saved in the file.

const { addColors, createLogger, format, transports } = require('winston');

const { combine, colorize, printf, timestamp } = format;

const logFormat = printf((info) => {
  return `[${info.timestamp}] ${info.level}: ${info.message}`;
});

const rawFormat = printf((info) => {
  return `[${info.timestamp}] ${info.level}: ${info.message}`;
});

const config = require('../config');

const logger = createLogger({
  level: config.DEBUG,
  format: combine(
    colorize(),
    timestamp({ format: 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss' }),
    logFormat,
  ),
  transports: [
    new transports.File({
      filename: 'combined.log',
    }),
    new transports.Console({ format: combine(timestamp(), rawFormat) }),
  ],
});

addColors({
  debug: 'white',
  error: 'red',
  info: 'green',
  warn: 'yellow',
});

module.exports = logger;

Console will look like this:

[2018-06-12 15:54:14] info: Listening on port 9000

Where info is colorized to green, but if i look at the combine.log file, it will show as:

[2018-06-12 15:54:14] [32minfo[39m: Listening on port 9000

Is it possible to log raw text to a file, but still show colors in terminal?

If not, is there another library that allows for this? Say bunyan?

Answer 1

I don't know if u need this anymore but late is better than never.

Basically you just need to drop colorzie()from general format that you have defined then use it in the specify transports you want to show color.

var options = {
    console: {
        handleExceptions: true,
        level: 'debug',
        format: combine(colorize(), myFormat)
    },
    verbose: {
        filename: './logs/debug/mobile_api-%DATE%.log',
        level: 'debug',
        format: combine(myFormat)
    },
}
const logger = winston.createLogger({
levels: myCustomLevels.levels,
transports: [
    new transports.Console(options.console),
    new transports.file(options.verbose),
]
});

With this, when the log get printed in the console, you can see color and when write to file, it won't show any color code at all.