---
title: 'Configuring error formatting'
metaTitle: 'Configuring error formatting (Concepts)'
metaDescription: 'This page explains how to configure the formatting of errors when using Prisma Client.'
---

<TopBlock>

By default, Prisma Client uses [ANSI escape characters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code) to pretty print the error stack and give recommendations on how to fix a problem. While this is very useful when using Prisma Client from the terminal, in contexts like a GraphQL API, you only want the minimal error without any additional formatting.

This page explains how error formatting can be configured with Prisma Client.

</TopBlock>

## Formatting levels

There are 3 error formatting levels:

1. **Pretty Error** (default): Includes a full stack trace with colors, syntax highlighting of the code and extended error message with a possible solution for the problem.
2. **Colorless Error**: Same as pretty errors, just without colors.
3. **Minimal Error**: The raw error message.

In order to configure these different error formatting levels, there are two options:

- Setting the config options via environment variables
- Providing the config options to the `PrismaClient` constructor

## Formatting via environment variables

- [`NO_COLOR`](/orm/reference/environment-variables-reference#no_color): If this env var is provided, colors are stripped from the error messages. Therefore you end up with a **colorless error**. The `NO_COLOR` environment variable is a standard described [here](https://no-color.org/).
- `NODE_ENV=production`: If the env var `NODE_ENV` is set to `production`, only the **minimal error** will be printed. This allows for easier digestion of logs in production environments.

### Formatting via the `PrismaClient` constructor

Alternatively, use the `PrismaClient` [`errorFormat`](/orm/reference/prisma-client-reference#errorformat) parameter to set the error format:

```ts
const prisma = new PrismaClient({
  errorFormat: 'pretty',
})
```
