You may have noticed in our code snippets so far that we weren't using console.log(err) or console.error(err). That's because starting with the Node 0.6, core error properties are not enumerable anymore, which means we won't get stack for example.

Let's test this out and see what happens:

console.log(new Error('bad things happen'));

The preceding snippet displays the following command at the terminal:

$ node logging-errors.js
[Error: bad things happen]

So, all we got was the error message, which isn't very helpful without the full stack trace. A popular logging module called bunyan has a custom serializer for errors, so you won't encounter this problem if you use it.

Another simpler module that only does error serialization is nice-error, which we can install with NPM. If we adjust the snippet to use this module, we get what we'd expect, namely the error properties (name, message, and stack):

$ node logging-errors.js
{ name: 'Error',
  message: 'bad things happen',
  stack: 'Error...