Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Better Node.js Console Dumps with console-probe

By  on  

Writing JavaScript in the Node.js environment has always felt a bit more difficult; probably because browser developer tools have become incredibly powerful, interactive, and visually appealing.  Using console.log on the client side isn't the best of experiences and obviously isn't interactive.

Though not interactive, I've found that console-probe is an improvement over console.log, providing me highlighted property types, lengths, and a nice visual tree view.

const probe = require('console-probe')

const donut = {
  'id': '0001',
  'type': 'donut',
  'name': 'Cake',
  'description': 'A small fried cake of sweetened dough, typically in the shape of a ball or ring.',
  'ppu': 0.55,
  'common': true,
  'batters':
  {
    'batter':
    [
      { 'id': '1001', 'type': 'Regular' },
      { 'id': '1002', 'type': 'Chocolate' },
      { 'id': '1003', 'type': 'Blueberry' },
      { 'id': '1004', 'type': "Devil's Food" }
    ]
  },
  // .....


// Highlight nicely to console
const prober = probe.get()
prober(donut)

console-probe is one of those nice, luxury utilities that can make debugging in a static environment just a bit better!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    jQuery Link Nudging

    A few weeks back I wrote an article about MooTools Link Nudging, which is essentially a classy, subtle link animation achieved by adding left padding on mouseover and removing it on mouseout. Here's how to do it using jQuery: The jQuery JavaScript It's important to keep...

  • By
    Using MooTools For Opacity

    Although it's possible to achieve opacity using CSS, the hacks involved aren't pretty. If you're using the MooTools JavaScript library, opacity is as easy as using an element's "set" method. The following MooTools snippet takes every image with the "opacity" class and sets...

Discussion

  1. Cathy Mayhue

    Console probe seems to be an interesting improvement and it is obvious it could make javascript programming simpler.

  2. Paolo

    Nice. For me though, 

    console.dir({ process }, {colors: 1, depth: Infinity})

    (or any other depth that suits your use case) does the job for many use cases.

  3. Grant Carthew

    The console-probe package has been updated since this article was written. It now has complex type support.

    As Paolo has pointed out, console.dir is quite good however it is a little verbose when all you want to do is see the API that is exposed by an object. Also, console-probe includes function signatures.

  4. essaydune

    Thanks for clarification and one more guys, I have a request for you – Could you please help me change the directory of my Node.js script? 

    #!/usr/bin/env node
process.chdir('/Users')

    I know it can be done through process.chdir(directory) but I do not know how to do that.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!