[3.0.0] Error object is not parsed or printed

Please tell us about your environment:

• winston version?
  • [-] winston@3.0.0-rc5
• node -v outputs: v8.11.1
• Operating System? (Windows, macOS, or Linux) macOS
• Language? (all | TypeScript X.X | ES6/7 | ES5 | Dart) All

What is the problem?

Logging a node Error object results in an empty message:

Example:

const winston = require('winston');
const { createLogger, format, transports } = winston;

const logger = createLogger({
  transports: [
    new transports.Console()
  ]
});

let err = new Error('this is a test');
logger.log({level: 'error', message: err});

Resulting output:

% node test.js
{"level":"error","message":{}}

Also:

logger.error(new Error('hello'))

Results in:

{"level":"error"}

What do you expect to happen instead?

I Expect the message key to have at least the error message included in it. If I try a custom formatter, info also doesn’t have the error object in it so it must be stripped out somewhere?

Other information

Let me know how I can help - happy to flick a PR but I don’t know my way around winston@3.0.0 enough yet to find it

[andretti1977]

No really, this is unacceptable for a logging library. Maintainer should simply put a well highlighted example on docs where it is shown how to log an error, even defining custom printf format and non json format and where you can log error with something like logger.error(“something”, err) and logger.error(err) Winston seemed to be great but this issue is incredibly unacceptable

[dandv]

Am I missing something, or is it a complete headache (or even impossible?) to get the same output one easily gets from console.log/error/warn?

try {
   // ...
  throw new Error('foo');
} catch (e) {
  console.error('Caught error:', e);  // convenient, informative
  logger.error('Caught error:', e);  // nope, the second parameter is something else (couldn't find docs)
  logger.error(`Caught error: ${e}`);  // stack lost
  logger.error(`Caught error: ${JSON.stringify(e)}`);  // Caught error: {}
}

What is the equivalent winston code to get the same output as console.error('Caught error:', error);?

And where is the documentation for the parameters taken by the convenience methods on the logger object?