Auditing in Express.js Middleware

Question

Im looking at universal way to audit the express middleware that I have written for some APIs.

I have come up with several ways of doing but none seems that efficient to me. For now I'm only wanting to log to console or a log file but later on I will be looking at a datastore.

I can quite easily use a "logging" library such as bunyan in the API routing to do this. But this means Il have to call the logging function everywhere that I want to audit.

Use a central function such as given in the snippet to do the logging. This is nice way to log the request/response of the APIs but doesn't help when it comes to auditing the critical information such as auditing a user id from a user registration. Or auditing an email address when a user logs in.

function auditUserAction(apiFunction) {

    function jsonWrapper(funcToWrap, userAction) {
        return function() {
            userAction.jsonResponse = arguments[0];
            return funcToWrap.apply(this, arguments);
        }
    }

    return function() {
        req = arguments[0];
        res = arguments[1];

        // Overriding json method so we can capture the json response
        res.json = jsonWrapper(res.json, userAction);
        userAction.url = req.url;
        userAction.userId =  req.headers.user_id;
        userAction.referer = req.headers.referer;
        userAction.browserAgent = req.headers['user-agent'];
        result = apiFunction.apply(this, arguments);
        userAction.responseStatusCode = res.statusCode;
        userAction.responseBody = res.body;
        logger.info("Action", userAction);
        return result;
    }
}
..........
router = require('express').Router();
router.post('/users', auditUserAction(createUser));

Is there a better strategy than this ? Ive searched the web but couldn't find anyway of doing this elegantly.

Auditing in Express.js Middleware

0 Answers0