Node: tty.isatty(1) and process.stdout.isTTY in worker_threads worker return different values

[1999]

• Version: 12.4.0
• Platform: Darwin C02WJ0U4HTDG 17.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 17.7.0: Wed Apr 24 21:17:24 PDT 2019; root:xnu-4570.71.45~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
• Subsystem: tty

I found out recently that in a worker which is run with worker_threads, tty.isatty(1) returns True whereas process.stdout.isTTY returns False.

This led to a weird issue in mocha - a popular library for testing: https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/pull/3955

[richardlau]

See https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/26946#issuecomment-477502347

[1999]

Thanks for the link, interesting. But it doesn't say anything about tty.isatty API, does it?

[addaleax]

@1999 This still seems like expected behaviour – fd’s are per-process, so fd 1 is going to be a TTY in one thread if it is a TTY for any thread. The problem is that in Workers, process.stdout does not refer to fd 1.

[1999]

@addaleax I didn't know that tty.isatty(fd) is talking about the whole process. Maybe it's worth it to add a note about it do the documentation?

[bnoordhuis]

You're welcome to open a documentation pull request but where would you add it? There are tens if not hundreds of core methods that accept a file descriptor. It'd be incongruent to single out tty.isatty().

Its behavior also isn't the least bit surprising to me but maybe that's just me.

[1999]

For me as a Node.JS developer, it's not clear if I should use tty.isatty(fd) or process.stdout.isTTY - they look the same from the documentation and also the documentation doesn't explicitly say that one is about the process even when we create a thread within this process and another is talking about a thread.

[addaleax]

I’m having the same issue as Ben here – I don’t see a good place in the documentation that isn’t “everywhere”…

For me as a Node.JS developer, it's not clear if I should use tty.isatty(fd) or process.stdout.isTTY

We could document that tty.isatty(fd) should be used when dealing with a file descriptor, and process.stdout.isTTY when dealing with process.stdout, but that seems somewhat redundant? But that’s kind of the answer to the question of which function to use…

[devsnek]

i think the question is more like (@1999 correct me if i'm wrong) when should someone be dealing with fd 1 vs when should someone be dealing with process.stdout.

[1999]

Exactly.

[addaleax]

I would think of the fd-handling functions as low-level primitives that are there for when you really need them, but generally dealing with the corresponding JS objects makes more sense when available (e.g. 99 % of the time using fs.createReadStream() makes more sense then manually reading data using fs.read()).

In the case of isatty(), I think the use cases are very limited. I could see somebody using it for detecting TTY-ness for non-stdio fd’s (e.g. for native openpty() or tcgetattr()/tcsetattr() wrappers), or maybe when the goal is to intentionally test the per-process state, including when process.stdout has been overridden or when you’re in a Worker. But here too, I think 99 % of the time you’d want to use the convenience JS objects.

Is that helpful? Is that something that we could or should document in some way?

[devsnek]

it's also worth noting that accessing process.std{out, in, err} can change their modes and that node will start processing data (which may or may not be a good thing depending on your use case)

[Fishrock123]

Related to this, we may want to properly publicly (think, docs) expose process.stdout.fd?