Using express-pino-logger and pino-pretty together - node.js

Question

I'm have existing code that uses express-pino-logger. This words great with our ELK stack setup, but is pretty unfortunate (logs minified JSON) when running locally.
I'd like to use pino-pretty to make local use not a pain.
There is an alternative in pino-pretty-express that solves the problem, but uses its own pretty formatter. I'd like to use the standard packages from pinojs if I could.
Here's what I have so far:
// with just pino-pretty installed, pino works out of the box
const pino = require('pino')
const logger = pino({
prettyPrint: true
})
logger.info('hi') // prints pretty
And:
// adding this option to express-pino-logger, doesn't work
const pino = require('express-pino-logger')
const logger = pino({
prettyPrint: true
})
logger.info('hi') // does NOT print pretty

Answer 1

I've solved my own problem I guess.
The key lies in the very last example on the express-pino-logger page:
'use strict'
const pino = require('pino')()
const expressPino = require('express-pino-logger')({
logger: pino
})
Here's my solution:
// use pino-pretty and express-pino-logger together
const basicPino = require('pino')
const basicPinoLogger = basicPino({ prettyPrint: true })
const expressPino = require('express-pino-logger')({
logger: basicPinoLogger
})
const logger = expressPino.logger
logger.info('hi') // prints pretty

Answer 2

const pino = require('pino');
const expressPino = require('express-pino-logger');
const logger = pino({ level: process.env.LOG_LEVEL || 'info', prettyPrint: true });
const expressLogger = expressPino({ logger });

Answer 3

I suppose the express pino logger is explicitly being used to log unique request ids. There is an alternative approach using the http-context and node-uuid (although I am unsure about the benchmark results)
You can create a unique uuid before the call of each request like this
const uuid = require('node-uuid');
const httpContext = require('express-http-context');
....
app.use(httpContext.middleware);
app.use((req, res, next) => {
httpContext.set('reqId', uuid.v4());
next();
});
.. you can obtain the requestId anywhere from the httpContext. No need of relying on the req object to be passed
Example usage in a custom implementation of PinoLogger service
public infoLogService (fileName): pino.Logger {
return pino({
level: 'info',
name: this.appService.getApp_name(),
messageKey: 'feedback-Logs',
base: {pid: process.pid, hostname: os.hostname,
timestamp: this.getTimeStamp(),
appName: this.appService.getApp_name(),
fileName: fileName,
request_id: isNullOrUndefined(httpContext.get('reqId')) ? 'Not an actual request ' : httpContext.get('reqId')
},
enabled: true,
useLevelLabels: true,
});
}
For every http calls, we get a UUID. for other type of loggings like logger invocation before the app starts to find if the connection to database happened successfully, there will be no uuid and hence passed a default message