pino

What is pino?

Pino is a very low overhead Node.js logger, which is inspired by Bunyan. It is designed to be as minimal as possible and to perform logging tasks with a very small performance overhead. Pino provides a simple to use API for structured logging and can be easily integrated with different transports for log processing.

What are pino's main functionalities?

Basic Logging

This feature allows you to perform basic logging tasks, such as logging informational messages.

const pino = require('pino');
const logger = pino();
logger.info('Hello, this is an info message!');

Logging with Different Levels

Pino allows you to log messages with different severity levels, such as error, warn, and debug.

const logger = pino();
logger.error('This is an error message');
logger.warn('This is a warning message');
logger.debug('This is a debug message');

Child Loggers

You can create child loggers from a parent logger, which can inherit the configuration of the parent and can also have additional properties.

const parentLogger = pino();
const childLogger = parentLogger.child({ a: 'property' });
childLogger.info('Hello from child logger');

Custom Serializers

Pino allows you to define custom serializers for logging objects in a specific way.

const logger = pino({
  serializers: {
    req: (req) => ({ method: req.method, url: req.url })
  }
});
logger.info({ req: requestObject }, 'Request log message');

Pretty Printing

For development purposes, Pino can be combined with the 'pino-pretty' module to format logs in a more readable way.

const pino = require('pino');
const pretty = require('pino-pretty');
const logger = pino(pretty());
logger.info('This will be pretty printed');

Other packages similar to pino

winston

Winston is a multi-transport async logging library for Node.js. It is designed to be a simple and universal logging library with support for multiple transports. Compared to Pino, Winston is more feature-rich and configurable but can be heavier on performance.

bunyan

Bunyan is a simple and fast JSON logging library for Node.js services. Like Pino, it is inspired by the Unix philosophy and focuses on structured logging. Bunyan is more similar to Pino in terms of philosophy, but Pino claims to be faster and more efficient.

log4js

Log4js is a logging framework for Node.js, which provides flexible configuration and supports multiple appenders. It is similar to the Log4j library for Java. Compared to Pino, Log4js offers more traditional logging features but may not be as performance-optimized.

README

pino

Very low overhead Node.js logger.

Documentation

• Benchmarks ⇗
• API ⇗
• Browser API ⇗
• Redaction ⇗
• Child Loggers ⇗
• Transports ⇗
• Web Frameworks ⇗
• Pretty Printing ⇗
• Asynchronous Logging ⇗
• Ecosystem ⇗
• Help ⇗
• Long Term Support Policy ⇗

Install

Using NPM:

$ npm install pino

Using YARN:

$ yarn add pino

If you would like to install pino v6, refer to https://github.com/pinojs/pino/tree/v6.x.

Usage

const logger = require('pino')()

logger.info('hello world')

const child = logger.child({ a: 'property' })
child.info('hello child!')

This produces:

{"level":30,"time":1531171074631,"msg":"hello world","pid":657,"hostname":"Davids-MBP-3.fritz.box"}
{"level":30,"time":1531171082399,"msg":"hello child!","pid":657,"hostname":"Davids-MBP-3.fritz.box","a":"property"}

For using Pino with a web framework see:

• Pino with Fastify
• Pino with Express
• Pino with Hapi
• Pino with Restify
• Pino with Koa
• Pino with Node core http
• Pino with Nest

Essentials

Development Formatting

The pino-pretty module can be used to format logs during development:

Transports & Log Processing

Due to Node's single-threaded event-loop, it's highly recommended that sending, alert triggering, reformatting, and all forms of log processing are conducted in a separate process or thread.

In Pino terminology, we call all log processors "transports" and recommend that the transports be run in a worker thread using our pino.transport API.

For more details see our Transports⇗ document.

Low overhead

Using minimum resources for logging is very important. Log messages tend to get added over time and this can lead to a throttling effect on applications – such as reduced requests per second.

In many cases, Pino is over 5x faster than alternatives.

See the Benchmarks document for comparisons.

Bundling support

Pino supports being bundled using tools like webpack or esbuild.

See Bundling document for more information.

The Team

Matteo Collina

https://github.com/mcollina

https://www.npmjs.com/~matteo.collina

https://twitter.com/matteocollina

David Mark Clements

https://github.com/davidmarkclements

https://www.npmjs.com/~davidmarkclements

https://twitter.com/davidmarkclem

James Sumners

https://github.com/jsumners

https://www.npmjs.com/~jsumners

https://twitter.com/jsumners79

Thomas Watson Steen

https://github.com/watson

https://www.npmjs.com/~watson

https://twitter.com/wa7son

Contributing

Pino is an OPEN Open Source Project. This means that:

Individuals making significant and valuable contributions are given commit-access to the project to contribute as they see fit. This project is more like an open wiki than a standard guarded open source project.

See the CONTRIBUTING.md file for more details.

Acknowledgments

This project was kindly sponsored by nearForm.

Logo and identity designed by Cosmic Fox Design: https://www.behance.net/cosmicfox.

License

Licensed under MIT.