NodeXH: NodeJS With a Better Exception Handler

Table of Contents generated with DocToc

• What It Is
• How to Install
• How to Use
• What to Expect
• Related
• To Do

What It Is

NodeXH is a drop-in wrapper for the NodeJS executable hat provides better stacktraces.

How to Install

npm install -g nodexh

How to Use

Use nodexh path/to/file.js instead of node path/to/file.js, and you're good to go.

What to Expect

• Stack trace items will be reversed, so most recent calls will be shown last, i.e. also closest to where the cursor of your terminal is.
• Stack traces will show source contexts (3 lines by default) except where files can not be opened or are NodeJS internals.
• Source code shown will honor sourcemaps, which is great when you're using the likes of CoffeeScript or TypeScript.
• The error message will be repeated to avoid having to scroll up when stack traces get longer.
• Colors!

Related

• https://github.com/mozilla/source-map/
• https://sokra.github.io/source-map-visualization/
• https://medium.com/@nodejs/source-maps-in-node-js-482872b56116:
  • "In v13.7.0 a public API was introduced for interacting with source maps."—link
  • "You can start using Node.js’ source map functionality today: make sure you have an up-to-date version of Node.js installed, and run your programs with the flag --enable-source-maps."

To Do

• Add error.name, error.code; where node reports TypeError: TEMPLATES.main_2 is not a function, nodexh only reports EXCEPTION: TEMPLATES.main_2 is not a function
• visually indicate spot of error (e.g. by reversing)
• fix async stacktraces (probably not yet handled correctly; might be issue with stackman?)
• consider utf8ize-sourcemaps in case there should be problems w/ 32bit characters
• truncate long lines in context
• offer capabilities of NodeXH as API so applications (such as test libraries) can easily retrieve source code, display source lines with contexts