Node.js: Visual code snippets and cleaner stack traces with your Node.js code

Use the callsite-record package on NPM to create pretty looking stack traces. To give an example, if I throw an error in my Node.js Express route handler, I see a stack trace like this:

Error: Average Stack Traces
    at someAsyncThing (/Users/uhn7899/development/modern-devtools/src/server/routes/index.js:25:8)
    at router.get (/Users/uhn7899/development/modern-devtools/src/server/routes/index.js:29:8)
    at Layer.handle [as handle_request] (/Users/uhn7899/development/modern-devtools/node_modules/express/lib/router/layer.js:95:5)
    at Layer.handle [as handle_request] (/Users/uhn7899/development/modern-devtools/node_modules/express/lib/router/layer.js:95:5)
    at trim_prefix (/Users/uhn7899/development/modern-devtools/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:317:13)
    ...
Many others lines
    ...
    at next (/Users/uhn7899/development/modern-devtools/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:275:10)

This stack trace has a lot of noise and contains information I'm not interested in.

To improve this, I can create a cleaner stack trace function:

function cleanStackTrace(reason) {
    return require('callsite-record')({
        forError: reason
    }).renderSync({
        stackFilter(frame) {
            return !frame.getFileName().includes('node_modules');
        }
    });
}

And use it like this:

process.on('unhandledRejection', reason => {
    console.log(cleanStackTrace(reason));
});

Because I am excluding code in node_modules, my stack trace now looks like this, in its entirety:

   at someAsyncThing (/Users/uhn7899/development/modern-devtools/src/server/routes/index.js:23:8)
   at router.get (/Users/uhn7899/development/modern-devtools/src/server/routes/index.js:27:8)

And I see the exact snippet of code, with syntax highlighting, which caused the error. I can see this snippet without going back to my editor:

   21 |
   22 |async function someAsyncThing() {
 > 23 |	throw new Error('Better Stack Traces');
   24 |}
   25 |

Notes:

• Consider your project carefully, you may not wish to hide code present in node_modules.
• This example hooks into unhandledRejection, but it is generally safer to handle your errors earlier on.