Option to disable console (CLI terminal) clearing

[ravinggenius]

• I have searched the issues of this repository and believe that this is not a duplicate.

Expected Behavior

When developing an app, with or without a third-party server (express, for instance), the app should reload without "clearing" the terminal. When starting with next dev --preserve-log, the log should not be obscured. This option should also be available when starting programmatically with const app = next({ dev, preserveLog: true });.

Current Behavior

The log scrolls offscreen every time the app rebuilds.

Context

I will often start troubleshooting code with console.log. Having to take my hands off the keyboard to scroll back through the logs slows me down and breaks my flow.

Your Environment

Tech	Version
next	v4.1.1
node	v8.7.0
OS	macOS 10.13

[liweinan0423]

+1

[skyend]

Using

const app = next({ dev, quiet: true });

[timneutkens]

The terminal clearing is done by friendly-errors-webpack-plugins https://github.com/geowarin/friendly-errors-webpack-plugin so this is an upstream issue 👍

[ravinggenius]

Thanks for the responses! I did some investigation and discovered that next({ dev, quiet: true }) will skip friendly-errors-webpack-plugin altogether. This works, but I like having the friendly messages the plugin provided. next doesn't currently pass any options to friendly-errors-webpack-plugin, so it's either the defaults-with-console-clearing or nothing. Would there be any interest in taking an object of options to pass through to friendly-errors-webpack-plugin? I'm happy to provide a pull request if it has a chance of being merged. This also opens the door to enable desktop notifications, which would be nice.

[MadelineRitchie]

With the new Next.js 5 extendable webpack configuration, you can do the following:

Inside your next.config.js, mimic the default loading of the plugin (as shown here https://github.com/zeit/next.js/blob/canary/server/build/webpack.js)

const FriendlyErrorsWebpackPlugin = require('friendly-errors-webpack-plugin')

module.exports = {
  webpack(config, { isServer, dev }) {
    // remove friendlyerrorsplugin
    config.plugins = config.plugins.filter((plugin) => plugin.constructor.name !== 'FriendlyErrorsWebpackPlugin')

    // add it back in with custom options
    if (dev && !isServer) {
      config.plugins.push(new FriendlyErrorsWebpackPlugin({ clearConsole: false }))
    }
    return config
  }
}

[ravinggenius]

Thank you @jasonritchie. I'm not using Next anymore, but I'll look this up the next time I do.

[binarykitchen]

The above hack might work but isn't very elegant. Can't we introduce a new option here to disable console clearing, simple as that?

[hiddentao]

Would be nice to have this.

[maerzhase]

@jasonritchie 's example isn't working anymore. shortly printing all plugins from the next-js-config showed that there is no friendly-errors-webpack-plugin. how is the clearing handled in the latest version?