Middleware not working because of instrumentation

This one was completely my fault, but it was deeply burried. Middleware was not working. Regardless of what I put inside the file, nothing happens. And I needed it because I needed the server to know what’s the current URL on the server side (which I couldn’t implement back then) 😂

There were no errors at all! It just wasn’t working.

I started carefully reading all the logs, and I saw a warning saying that it cannot acccess some browser related APIs. After a lot of tinkering and deleting anything that is browser related (so I can catch the issue), I ended up deleting chalk. Which is coloring the output of a log.

And since we were using it in many places, the logger util ended up in the instrumentation file, so that I can pretty-print what branch we’re running on during startup.

And because of that error, which was silently devoured from Next’s internals, middleware couldn’t boot properly.

p.s. I ended up using picocolors.