LogTau

A fast, ESM-only, structured logger for modern Node.js. Output is NDJSON, the public API is small, the hot path is designed to do as little work as possible, and the package has zero production dependencies.

This repository is a pnpm workspace. The core library is @ctrlback/logtau; a set of satellite packages add context propagation, framework adapters, extra destinations and output formats.

Requirements

• Node.js >= 22.6
• Pure ESM consumer (the packages are "type": "module" with no CJS export)

Quick start

pnpm add @ctrlback/logtau

import { createLogger, stdoutSink } from '@ctrlback/logtau'

const log = createLogger({ level: 'info', sink: stdoutSink() })

log.info('server started', { port: 3000 })
log.warn('rate limit nearing', { remaining: 12 })

The @ctrlback/logtau guide covers bindings, the category registry, sinks, redaction, record shaping and pluggable output formats.

Packages

Package	What it gives you
@ctrlback/logtau	Core structured logger: NDJSON output, category registry, redaction, pluggable formatters.
@ctrlback/logtau-context	Propagate ambient fields across async boundaries with AsyncLocalStorage.
@ctrlback/logtau-hono	Per-request child logger and access logs for Hono.
@ctrlback/logtau-drizzle	Route Drizzle ORM query logs through logtau.
@ctrlback/logtau-egress	Log destinations: files with rotation and compression, plus HTTP, TCP, TLS, and UDP network sinks (including GELF over UDP).
@ctrlback/logtau-formats	Extra output formatters: logfmt and GELF.
@ctrlback/logtau-pretty	Human-readable NDJSON, as a CLI or a Transform stream.
@ctrlback/logtau-worker	Move log serialization and writing to a dedicated worker thread.

Benchmarks

A benchmark against pino lives in packages/bench-vs-pino/.