Most of the existing libraries capture and return the results from stderr and stdout. This although useful, makes it really hard to recreate the original console statements if you need to

This package provides a way to do so by overriding the console methods for the duration of the capture.

Installation

This package is published on npm and can be installed using

npm i capture-console-logs

Example

const CaptureConsole = require("capture-console-logs").default

const cc = new CaptureConsole();
console.log("ping pong") // not captured

cc.start()

console.log("simple log")
console.info("informative log", {a:1})
console.error(new Error("Our small petty error"))
console.warn("Better Watch Out!")
console.debug("please work1")

cc.stop()
console.log(cc.getCaptures());

The output for the above example is

[
  { function: 'log', args: [ 'simple log' ], ts: 1673463210311 },
  {
    function: 'info',
    args: [ 'informative log', '{"a":1}' ],
    ts: 1673463210311
  },
  {
    function: 'error',
    args: [
      '{"stack":"Error: Our small petty error\\n    at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/navdeep/Desktop/nsr/test/me/index.js:10:15)\\n    at Module._compile (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1105:14)\\n    at Object.Module._extensions..js (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1159:10)\\n    at Module.load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:981:32)\\n    at Function.Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:822:12)\\n    at Function.executeUserEntryPoint [as runMain] (node:internal/modules/run_main:77:12)\\n    at node:internal/main/run_main_module:17:47","message":"Our small petty error"}'
    ],
    ts: 1673463210312
  },
  {
    function: 'warn',
    args: [ 'Better Watch Out!' ],
    ts: 1673463210312
  },
  { function: 'debug', args: [ 'please work1' ], ts: 1673463210312 }
]

Note: By default, while capturing original logs are not displayed in the console. To allow execution while capturing, pass allowOriginalExecution as true in the start command

cc.start(true)

Whenever needed, you can use the flush method to clear all captured logs.

You can also create the original log using these captures as follows

const CaptureConsole, {makeOriginalLog} = require("capture-console-logs")

// [...]

const captures = cc.getCaptures();
captures.forEach(log => {
  CaptureConsole.makeOriginalLog(log)
})

This code is barely tested and so PR's, improvements and issues are all welcome