Pest Control

A (hopefully) useful debug logger designed as a drop-in replacement for debug with some extra bells and whistles.

Similarities

As mentioned above, pest control can be used as a drop-in replacement for debug. If you use debug and you like it, you probably have no reason to change.

Differences

Pest control adds a few extra features:

logger.log()

A simple alias to the top-level function to print logs.

logger.child(name)

Create a child of logger with the given name. This is useful for things like creating a logger in your main module and passing it to sub modules, these sub modules can than use a child of the original logger rather than creating their own with no record of inheritance.

For example:

const pc = require('pest-control')
const logger = pc('my-module')

logger('loading child')
require('./child')(logger)

Meanwhile in child.js:

module.exports = function (parentLogger) {
  const logger = parentLogger.child('child')
  logger('child loaded')
}

Which would yield something like the following output (assuming, of course, DEBUG is set to my-module*):

  my-module loading child
  my-module:child child loaded

logger.start(label)

Start an explicit timer with a label, this stores a timestamp and also immediately prints a start message, for example:

const logger = pc('my-module')

logger.start('loading dependencies')

Which would print:

  my-module loading dependencies start

logger.finish(label)

End an explicit timer. If the given label has not been passed to start() this is a no-op.

const logger = pc('my-module')

logger.start('loading')
setTimeout(() => {
  logger.finish('loading')
}, 100)

Which would print:

  my-module loading start
  my-module loading +100ms

logger.count(label)

Count how many times a thing happens, for example:

const logger = pc('my-module')

logger.count('did something')
logger.count('did something')
logger.count('did something')

Which would print something like:

  my-module did something #1
  my-module did something #2
  my-module did something #3