Debugging Cloudflare Workers with Logs

As with some of my previous Cloudflare posts, I've got a video version of this content so if you would rather watch that than read, just jump to the bottom. For the rest of you, here's a look at how to do some basic debugging with your Cloudflare Workers.

The Worker #

Before I get into how to debug, let's consider a simple Worker that has an API for returning random numbers. (Don't use Cloudflare Workers, or any serverless platform, for something so simple!)

export default {
	async fetch(request, env, ctx) {

		// ignore /favicon.ico
		if(request.url.includes('favicon.ico')) return new Response('');

		// https://community.cloudflare.com/t/parse-url-query-strings-with-cloudflare-workers/90286/3
		const { searchParams } = new URL(request.url);
		let min = parseInt(searchParams.get('min'),10);
		let max = parseInt(searchParams.get('max'),10);
		console.log(`inititial min, max: ${min}, ${max}`);
		if(isNaN(min)) min = 1;
		if(isNaN(max)) max = 100;
		if(min >= max) { min=1; max=100 };
		console.log(`corrected min, max: ${min}, ${max}`);

		let selectedNumber = getRandomIntInclusive(min, max);
		console.log(`selectedNumber: ${selectedNumber}`);
		
		return new Response(JSON.stringify({selectedNumber}), {
			headers: {
				'Content-Type':'application/json;charset=UTF-8'
			}
		});


	},
};

function getRandomIntInclusive(min, max) {
	min = Math.ceil(min);
	max = Math.floor(max);
	return Math.floor(Math.random() * (max - min + 1) + min); 
}

The logic boils down to - check the query string for a min and max value, do some basic validation, and then return a random number in that range. If you want you can actually hit this API here: https://randomnumber.raymondcamden.workers.dev/

Debugging Locally #

You'll notice a few console.log messages in there. When running the Worker locally via npm run start, the console messages will show up right in your terminal. I ran the API a few times with different values in the query string and you can see the debug output:

Console output in the terminal

Rather simple and actually what I expected to see when testing, so I was happy this "just worked".

Debugging in Production #

Don't. Ok, but what if you want to? Or simply check the output from logs? You've got two options for that. First, in the Cloudflare Workers dashboard, select your Worker, and then select the Logs tab:

Screen shot from the dashboard for the worker

You then click the nice blue button, Begin log stream:

Dashboard showing it is waiting for logs

Now, hit the URL for your Worker, or if it's triggered some other way, wait for that to happen. Once one or more events have happened, you'll see them show up:

2 events related to running the Worker

Finally, click on one to see the output. It's a big JSON result that I've copied below. I did remove some of the data to shorten it up a bit.

{
  "outcome": "ok",
  "scriptName": "randomnumber",
  "diagnosticsChannelEvents": [],
  "exceptions": [],
  "logs": [
    {
      "message": [
        "inititial min, max: 9, 99999"
      ],
      "level": "log",
      "timestamp": 1692730437605
    },
    {
      "message": [
        "corrected min, max: 9, 99999"
      ],
      "level": "log",
      "timestamp": 1692730437605
    },
    {
      "message": [
        "selectedNumber: 36327"
      ],
      "level": "log",
      "timestamp": 1692730437605
    }
  ],
  "eventTimestamp": 1692730437605,
  "event": {
    "request": {
      "url": "https://randomnumber.raymondcamden.workers.dev/?min=9&max=99999",
      "method": "GET",
      "headers": {
        "accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.7",
        "accept-encoding": "gzip",
        "accept-language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",
        "cf-connecting-ip": "76.72.14.122",
        "cf-ipcountry": "US",
        "cf-visitor": "{\"scheme\":\"https\"}",
        "connection": "Keep-Alive",
        "dnt": "1",
        "host": "randomnumber.raymondcamden.workers.dev",
        "priority": "u=0, i",
        "upgrade-insecure-requests": "1",
        "user-agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/115.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/115.0.1901.203",
        "x-forwarded-proto": "https",
        "x-real-ip": "76.72.14.122"
      },
      "cf": {
        "longitude": "-92.04770",
        "latitude": "30.18100",
        "tlsCipher": "AEAD-AES128-GCM-SHA256",
        "continent": "NA",
        "asn": 25921,
        "clientAcceptEncoding": "gzip, deflate, br",
        "country": "US",
        "tlsVersion": "TLSv1.3",
        "colo": "ATL",
        "timezone": "America/Chicago",
        "city": "Lafayette",
        "edgeRequestKeepAliveStatus": 1,
        "requestPriority": "",
        "httpProtocol": "HTTP/3",
        "region": "Louisiana",
        "regionCode": "LA",
        "asOrganization": "LUS Fiber",
        "metroCode": "642",
        "postalCode": "70503"
      }
    },
    "response": {
      "status": 200
    }
  },
  "id": 1
}

You'll notice the log messages, on top, with a handy timestamp as well. By the way, note how the cf part includes detailed geographic information about the requestor.

So that's debugging in the dashboard, how about in your local terminal? Turns out that's rather easy with the wrangler CLI, just use: npx wrangler tail X where X is the name of your Worker. So for me, that's npx wrangler tail randomnumber.

Once it's running, just hit your API again and you'll immediately see results.

Log output in the console