✨ Morgan Package in Node.js 🔥

Welcome new Node.js learners! In this blog post, My name is Md Taqui Imam and i am a Full Stack developer.

Today, I will explain how to use the Morgan logging package to log requests in your Node.js applications. This will help you debug and monitor your apps better.

What is Morgan?

Morgan is a popular HTTP request logger middleware for Node.js. It logs details about incoming requests to your server and outputs them to the console. This helps you inspect traffic and debug issues.

Here is Morgan NPM page 🔗

Morgan is available as an NPM package and can be installed using:

npm install morgan

Why Use Morgan for Logging?

• It's simple and easy to set up in your app

• Provides insight into your server traffic and requests

• Lets you log different request details like method, URL, status code, etc.

• Useful for debugging and monitoring app performance

• Helps track down issues and errors

• Many formatting options available for custom logging

How to Use Morgan Logging

1. Install Morgan Package

First install Morgan using NPM:

npm install morgan

2. Import and Initialize Morgan

Then in your main server file, import and initialize Morgan:

const morgan = require('morgan');

3. Set Logging Format

Next decide the logging format. Morgan has some common presets like combined, common, etc.

For example, to use the combined format:

app.use(morgan('combined'));

This will log details in Apache combined log format.

4. Place Morgan Middleware in App

Now place the morgan middleware in your Express app:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();

app.use(morgan('combined')); 

// Rest of app

Morgan will now log all incoming requests to your app!

The logging will look something like:

127.0.0.1 - - [23/Apr/2020:10:27:08 +0000] "GET /hello HTTP/1.1" 200 35 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"

This shows the client IP, date, requested URL, status code, response size, etc.

5. Use Custom Tokens for More Details

You can also create a custom Morgan logging format with tokens to log specific data points you want:

app.use(morgan(':method :url :status :res[content-length] - :response-time ms'));

This will log the method, URL, status code, response length and response time.

That covers the basics of setting up Morgan for logging in your Node.js and Express apps! Refer to their docs for more advanced usage.

Conclusion

Logging requests with Morgan gives you useful insights into your app traffic. It's easy to set up, customize and great for debugging issues.

Other helpful logging packages are Winston and Bunyan. But Morgan is simpler and great for basic request logging in Node.js apps.

I hope this tutorial helped you understand Morgan logging! You can now quickly add professional request logging to monitor and troubleshoot your Node.js backend apps.

Happy Coding😊