winston.transports.File ignores file creation errors

When adding File transport to a logger which points to a non-existing file and the directory does not have WRITE permissions, Winston does not catch ‘error’ event from the stream when it fails to create the log file. This prevents to catch the error in app code thus no one knows the file logger does not work at all because the error message from WriteStream is just stored in buffer and never gets written into the file or console.

Example code:

var logger = require('winston').Logger({
    transports: [
        new winston.transports.File({
            filename: '/var/log/server.log',
            level: 'debug'
        })
    ],
    emitErrs: true
});
logger.on('error', function (err) {
    console.error('Logging error info: ', JSON.stringify(err));
});

The file creation error in WriteStream is not captured and propagated to the logger. This could be easily fixed by capturing the ‘error’ event in file.js in File.prototype._createStream.createAndFlush method by adding:

self._stream.on('error', function(err) {
    self.emit('error', err);
});

[rjhilgefort]

I’m seeing this on 3.0.0-rc1

[eadsjr]

I’ve added the following to my bash execution script to prevent a repeat performance and provide a clue to someone examining the script as to what can go wrong.

# verify logging permission - user, group and read/write permission
if 
   [ "$(ls -ld log | awk '{print $3}')" != "$USER" ] || \
   [ "$(ls -ld log | awk '{print $4}')" != "$GROUP" ] ||  \ 
   [ "$(ls -ld log | awk '{print $1}' | head -c 3 | tail -c 2)" != "rw" ]
then
  echo "User '$USER' does not have appropriate permissions to access the 'log/' folder. Run 'chown -R $USER:$GROUP log/ ; chmod -R 750 log/' with admin privileges to prevent loss of logging functionality."
  echo "chown -R $USER:$GROUP log/ ; chmod -R 750 log/"
  exit 1
fi