logging-rails

A Railtie for for integrating the Logging framework into your Rails 3 application.

Features

The railtie provides only one feature - integration of the Logging framework into your Rails application. But this gives you quite a bit of flexibility to format your log messages and direct them to multiple logging destinations: stdout with colors, a rolling log file, email, or even get a growl notification.

Install

Add the logging-rails railtie gem to your Rails project's Gemfile and run bundle install.

gem 'logging-rails', :require => 'logging/rails'

A generator is included with the railtie that will create a config/logging.rb configuration file for use in your Rails project. Please run this generator before attempting to use the Logging framework.

rails generate logging:install

Usage

Out of the box, the Logging framework is configured to behave in the same way as the standard Rails logger setup. The major exception is that the log file will be rolled daily - gone are the days of 2GB log files on production servers.

The railtie adds a configuration option, log_to, that determines where log messages will be sent. This is an array of appender names (an appender writes log messages to some destination such as a file, STDOUT, syslog, email, etc.). The appender configuration should be set in your environment specific configuration file. For example, in production we would want to log to a file and send emails on error:

config.log_to = %w[file email]

The Logging framework sets the global log level from the log_level configuration item. However, each class can be assigned its own log level. This is very useful when debugging a single controller or model in your Rails application. Consider the example below. The overall log level for the application is set to :info, but the log level for the User model and controller is set to :debug.

config.log_level = :info
Logging.logger['User'].level = :debug
Logging.logger['UserController'].level = :debug

When using the logging railtie, a small display of the current logging configuration will be displayed when Rails is in development mode (environment). A description of the display can be found here.

root  ............................................  *debug      -T
- <Appenders::Stdout:0x806bc058 name="stdout">
- <Appenders::RollingFile:0x806bbc0c name="file">
  ActionController::Base  ........................   debug  +A  -T
  ActiveRecord::Base  ............................   debug  +A  -T
  ActiveSupport::Cache::FileStore  ...............   debug  +A  -T
  ActiveSupport::Dependencies  ...................   debug  +A  -T
  Logging  .......................................    *off  -A  -T
  Rails  .........................................   debug  +A  -T

This is useful for understanding more complex logging configurations. It can be annoying in day-to-day usage. To disable, set the show_log_configuration setting to false in the environment specific configuration file.

config.show_log_configuration = false

Author

Original author: Elliot Winkler

Contributors:

Tim Pease

License

The MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the Software), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.