padLevels warning appears in Winston@3

[SirProdigle]

Please tell us about your environment:

• _winston version?
  • winston@2
  • [ x] winston@3
• _node -v outputs: v14.13.1
• _Operating System: Linux
• _Language: ES6

What is the problem?

padLevels warning ("Accessing non-existent property 'padLevels' of module exports inside circular dependency") appears when using Winston 3.3.3. Issue has been mostly related to Winston@2

What do you expect to happen instead?

padLevels does not occur

Other information

Logger is created as so

var appRoot = require('app-root-path');
var winston = require('winston');
const colorizer = winston.format.colorize();

// define the custom settings for each transport (file, console)
var options = {
    console: {
        handleExceptions: true,
        level: "info",
        format: winston.format.combine(
            winston.format.timestamp({format: "HH:mm:ss"}),
            winston.format.simple(),
            winston.format.printf(msg =>
                colorizer.colorize(msg.level, `${msg.timestamp} - ${msg.level}: ${msg.message}`)
            ),
        )
    },
};

// instantiate a new Winston Logger with the settings defined above
const logger = new winston.createLogger({
    transports: [
        new winston.transports.Console(options.console)
    ],
    exitOnError: false, // do not exit on handled exceptions
});

// create a stream object with a 'write' function that will be used by `morgan`
logger.stream = {
    write: function(message, encoding) {
        // use the 'info' log level so the output will be picked up by both transports (file and console)
        logger.info(message);
    },
};

module.exports = logger;

A line such as logger.info("NPM package " + viewEngineData.expressName + " installed") will cause the warning.
unsure if my Winston setup is wrong but seem to be using only Winston3 functions

[camdagr8]

I'm seeing this issue too on Node 14.15.5

[DavidCockerill]

Also getting this issue... any suggestions out there?

[Heliks]

Any workarounds for this?

[DavidCockerill]

Yeah, switch to Pino :(

[akhila9996]

Any solution for this issue?
I don't want to switch to another library.

[hlynbech]

I can't reproduce the warning in a clean project where only [email protected] is installed, so the error is not in winston@3 itself. Also, winston@2 under node 14 does not trigger this warning either.

However, I can reproduce this error in a project where BOTH winston@2 AND winston@3 are included via different dependencies. 'padLevels' was removed from winston@3.

So I think the underlying issue could be conflicting versions of winston in your dependencies (or dependencies' dependencies).

[flotwig]

We also get this in [email protected]. This patch suppresses the warning:

diff --git a/node_modules/winston/lib/winston/common.js b/node_modules/winston/lib/winston/common.js
index 8ed9973..53cf4cd 100644
--- a/node_modules/winston/lib/winston/common.js
+++ b/node_modules/winston/lib/winston/common.js
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ exports.setLevels = function (target, past, current, isDefault) {
   }
 
   target.levels = current || config.npm.levels;
-  if (target.padLevels) {
+  if (target.hasOwnProperty('padLevels') && target.padLevels) {
     target.levelLength = exports.longestElement(Object.keys(target.levels));
   }
 

[davidrapin]

I can confirm that this happened with [email protected] but is fixed with [email protected]