Express js morgan third party middleware

 

Hello. Welcome to another new tutorial on express JS. Today, we will be talking about a third-party middleware which is also a module called morgan. To follow along in this article, you should have basic knowledge of node js and express.

If this is your first time learning about middleware or express js, I recommend you navigate to the node js section of this website and our YouTube channel to learn more.

As commonly described, morgan is an http request logger middleware. That is, morgan middleware prints out the details of every request made from your application on the console or command-line. This is a handy tool used during the development process for testing an application. This is possible because it morgan is a middleware, and you know every middleware has access to the request-response cycle of an application. 

Since morgan is a third-party middleware and module, it therefore needs to be installed before usage. To install morgan, navigate to your project directory from cmd (command-line) and type the command;

npm install morgan

Ensure you have a working internet connection. Wait for a while as npm downloads and installs morgan middleware in your local machine.

Now let’s see how it works;

Server.js 

Below are some points to take note of;

• The 4th line of code enables morgan to be used in the app. Notice the parameter of  morgan ( ). The parameters which can be passes in morgan ( ) simply describe how morgan should print out or log the http request info on the console or cmd. There are different parameters you can use to see how morgan will log or print the http requests which are ; dev, combined, tiny
• Each parameter is different in the way it logs the http request on the console. 
• The parameter “combined” logs the entire properties of the http request made from the browser.
• While the other params tiny and dev simply print out the route, method and time.
• You can therefore interchange them later in your code to see how they work.

OUTPUT

After starting your server, load your web page and then check your command line.

Thanks for reading.

Drop your questions and comments.