Stack trace layout

The default stack trace could definitely stand to be more human friendly.

Enter cute-stack, a tool for creating prettified stack traces.

Let's copy our app folder to pretty-stack-app and install cute-stack:

$ cp -fr app pretty-stack-app
$ cd app 
$ npm install --save cute-stack

Now let's place the following at the very top of the index.js file:

require('cute-stack')() 

Now let's run our process with a larger stack trace limit (as in the main recipe),

$ node --stack-trace-limit=21 index.js

Make a request, either with a browser, or if installed, curl:

$ curl http://localhost:3000/

As a result, we should see a beautified stack trace, similar to the following screenshot:

The cute-stack tool takes advantage of a proprietary V8 API, Error.prepareStackTrace, which can be assigned a function that receives error and stack inputs. This function can then process the stack and return a string that becomes the stack trace output.