Show HN: Loglayer: A fluid logging interface for JavaScript loggers

This has been in use on our production systems for around two years now at Switchboard (https://switchboard.app).

The problem we had was that we were using two different logging libs for our frontend and backend at the time (specifically roarr, and bunyan), and the API for the logging libs were not compatible with each other.

Loglayer was designed to wrap around popular JS logging libraries where you can swap out any underlying library without re-writing your log entries to adapt to the new library.

One common example is using plain "console" as a starting integration, but later swapping to a logging library like Winston once you've nailed down which JS logging lib fits your use-case. You can also swap to another from there (which we have done from bunyan to pino on our backend) if you need to later on.

It also provides a fluid API that standardizes how one should feed error, set context, and metadata. This means regardless of the underlying logging library used, developers use the same API to write logs throughout.

  log
  .withMetadata({ some: 'data'})
  .withError(new Error('test'))
  .info('my message')

With this new 4.x release, I added a plugin system allowing you to manipulate data before it is shipped to the underlying JS logger).