Note: travis is only failing because I haven't added log-file to npmconf/docs, as mentioned above.

Rather than making the location configurable, it should be a specific location that npm knows.

The reason it dumps into CWD today is that the user is there, and knows how to find it. However, once we add npm report to report bugs, it won't really matter. The debug log will just be a thing we can put into tmp or cache or wherever, since the user won't ever have to touch it.

Oh, hm.

Perhaps doesn't make this entirely redundant though, once npm report is ready then just set the default log location to tmp or cache or wherever. The location that npm knows is config.get('log-file'). This adds additional flexibility for advanced users who want it. Probably should strive to have as few hard-coded locations as possible – it's particularly frustrating when you need to change something but it's not possible because the author didn't envisage your particular use-case. Saying that though, once npm report lands I can't imagine any particularly compelling use-cases for a configurable debug log. I guess just +1 for making npm more hackable.

I don't feel strongly about this though, feel free to close.

If anything, npm is overly configurable, imo. There isn't much value in being able to set the specific filename, when you can already set the cache path, tmp path, prefix, etc. If we just say "it goes in one of those things", then that's fine. I mean, we don't make the path within the cache folder configurable, for example, or let lock filenames be configurable, etc.

I'm going to close this in favor of #6744, which will in turn probably end up getting closed in favor of the ring-buffer cache of recent debug logs that the npm team have been discussing internally for the last year or so. Thanks for putting this together and getting the ball rolling, Tim, and I'm sorry we let this sit around for so long.

my npm error log just scrolls off the dos window and I can find no .log file on my hard drive. How can one be expected to work out how to change that?