Mails

https://forum.xwiki.org/t/choice-of-logging-api/14217

Description

• API Requirements
• Existing Libraries
• Architecture
• Design decisions
• Criteria
• Choice

A logging API is useful for accurate error reporting. Especially as the logs won't be on the server, but on the user's client (i.e., browser or electron instance).

API Requirements

The minimal need is to have the following logging levels:

• Debug
• Info
• Warning
• Error

Existing Libraries

• Winston
• Pino
• Bunyan
• Loglevel
• Npmlog
• Browser default console.log API.
• roarr

Architecture

The suggested architecture is to define our own logging API, but to delegate the actual implementation to the selected library.

That was, we can more easily switch from one library to another if needed.

The main constraint is that we need to be careful not to define our API with operations specific to a given implementation

Design decisions

• While browsers have the ability to filter logs, do we have the possibility to also skip at log time:
  • based on the logger location (e.g., its module)?
  • based on the log level?

Criteria

• Library size
• Maintainers
• Support for browsers (i.e., not node only)
• Can log in a human-readable format (i.e., not json only)
• Support for typescript
• Support for named loggers (i.e., ability to create new logger with specific log levels)
• Support for formatting. Excluded as Javascript/Typescript have support for formatting at language level.

Choice

Library	Conclusion	Size	Maintainer	License	For Browser	Human-Readable	Typescript	Support for Named Logger
Pino		12k	2 main maintainers, last release on Feb. 2024	MIT	yes	yes	yes	we would need to implement it ourselves
LogLevel		8k (minified)	Mainly one contributor, last release Jan. 2024 Looks well documented and stable.	MIT	yes	yes	yes	yes
Browser API		0 (bundled)	supported by all browsers we support	bundled in browsers	yes	yes	yes	We would need to implement it ourselves
Roarr	Not free  Does very little as the concrete way to log is to be defined manually, the library is mostly providing high-level abstractions that we probably don't need, or would redefine in our own API	20k (minified)	Mainly one contributor, last release on Nov. 2023.	not free	yes	yes	yes	partial, can be custom-made using the “context” metadata
Winston	No Good support for browsers			MIT	no
Bunyan	No good support for browsers			MIT	no
Npmlog	No browser support