Node.js Best Practice Exception Handling

Question

I just started trying out node.js a few days ago. I\'ve realized that the Node is terminated whenever I have an unhandled exception in my program. This is different than the

Answer 1

Catching errors has been very well discussed here, but it's worth remembering to log the errors out somewhere so you can view them and fix stuff up.

​Bunyan is a popular logging framework for NodeJS - it supporst writing out to a bunch of different output places which makes it useful for local debugging, as long as you avoid console.log. ​ In your domain's error handler you could spit the error out to a log file.

var log = bunyan.createLogger({
  name: 'myapp',
  streams: [
    {
      level: 'error',
      path: '/var/tmp/myapp-error.log'  // log ERROR to this file
    }
  ]
});

This can get time consuming if you have lots of errors and/or servers to check, so it could be worth looking into a tool like Raygun (disclaimer, I work at Raygun) to group errors together - or use them both together. ​ If you decided to use Raygun as a tool, it's pretty easy to setup too

var raygunClient = new raygun.Client().init({ apiKey: 'your API key' });
raygunClient.send(theError);

​ Crossed with using a tool like PM2 or forever, your app should be able to crash, log out what happened and reboot without any major issues.