[BUG] When run script loglevel is ignored unless set to "silent"

[crystalfp]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Current Behavior

Running any script by npm shows a log of the script execution even if it is not an error. For example:

npm run my-script --loglevel error

> my_server@0.19.2 my-script D:\Project
> npx copyfiles --flat client/*.png server/http

The only way to silence the log message is by setting --loglevel silent

The problem is that setting loglevel in .npmrc silences also valid messages from npm. I had to spent too much time to debug why npm was not installing my application. Removing .npmrc revealed a version problem in my packages.

BTW this issue is a re-submission for npm@7 of #2468 for npm@6

Expected Behavior

If it is not an error, nothing should be shown by npm, only the script messages should appear.

Steps To Reproduce

• Create a directory with a project in it
• Edit package.json and add script "start": "node -e console.log('Hello')"
• Run npm start. It shows the log
• Run npm start --loglevel error. It show the log message, but it should not, it is not an error
• Run npm start --loglevel silent. No log message.

Environment

• OS: Windows 10 64bits
• Node: 16.2.0
• npm: 7.15.1

[ruyadorno]

hi @crystalfp thanks for taking the time to reporting this, there are a few other loglevel/output issues that this makes me think of that we were currently tackling:

• Make 'npm install --loglevel warn' Output Quieter #4335
• enhancement: cli should distinguish between stdout and stderr #4724

From my point of view it seems to me that tweaking npm run to only print errors (maybe only print the stderr stream from the child process?) is a reasonable thing to do.

@lukekarrys I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, I know you've been handling the overall output clean up so this one is a very good one to keep in mind.

[crystalfp]

Well, I got into the habit of using always the -s option. So in case of strange behaviors, I simply rerun npm without it. Having a functioning loglevel option (or something similar) that I can put in the .npmrc file and forget it is sure much simpler.

[lukekarrys]

In bcc781a, this output was moved from stdout to stderr when in --json mode.

I think this should probably be what happens all the time, but that would be a breaking change. I documented the new behavior with a comment in the code indicating this should be changed in the future. I think these should probably be log messages with a level of info (but maybe still rendered with a > prefix) so they can be hidden with the standard loglevel filters.

cli/lib/utils/display.js

Lines 321 to 326 in b54cdb8

	// In json mode, change output to stderr since we dont want to break json
	// parsing on stdout if the user is piping to jq or something.
	// XXX: in a future (breaking?) change it might make sense for run-script to
	// always output these banners with proc-log.output.error if we think they
	// align closer with "logging" instead of "output"
	level = output.KEYS.error

[lukekarrys]

I'm going to close this since we wont be tracking it as a bug. Instead it's on the v11 roadmap issue since changing it would be a breaking change npm/statusboard#488