express-trace-cli

Terminal collector for express-emits. Start the CLI, attach the reporter in your app, and watch requests trace live in an interactive three-pane view: sessions (one per attachTraceReporter() call), that session's requests, and the selected request's middleware timeline, logs, and status.

npm install express-trace-cli
npx express-trace-cli --port 4319 --secret devsecret

import express from 'express';
import { expressEmits } from 'express-emits';
import { attachTraceReporter } from 'express-trace-cli';

const app = express();
const { on } = expressEmits(app);
attachTraceReporter(on, { secret: 'devsecret' }); // ships events to the CLI above

app.listen(3000);

In a real terminal you get the interactive view: sessions on the left, that session's requests in the middle, the selected request's middleware timeline and logs on the right.

Keyboard only, no mouse support (the underlying TUI library doesn't have any).

Piped output, CI, or anything else without a real TTY falls back to a plain scrolling line per finished request instead:

→ GET /users/1  [3]
  ├─ auth                 2.1ms
  └─ anonymous 1          5.8ms
  log [auth] checking token
← 200 in 9.7ms

Subscribes to an expressEmits() instance's on and batches its events to the collector over HTTP.

Fire and forget: if the collector isn't running, events are dropped silently rather than blocking or retrying. This is a dev-time tool, not a durable log pipeline.

express-trace-cli [--port <n>] [--secret <token>]
# also: -p/-s shorthand, or PORT/TRACE_SECRET env vars

No --secret means the collector accepts unauthenticated events, fine on a machine you trust, not on a shared or non-localhost host. Setting it rejects any POST whose x-trace-secret header doesn't match, with a 401.

This covers exactly what express-emits emits: request.start/end, middleware.start/end, and log, grouped into sessions by attachTraceReporter() call. No schema validation, no request/response body capture. express-emits doesn't produce that data.

npm run build
npm run dev

MIT