glossy

glossy aims to be a very generic yet powerful library for both producing and also parsing raw syslog messages. The library aims to be capable of adhearing to both RFC 3164 and RFC 5424 and by itself does no network interactions, it's up to you to use this library as a syslog producer, a consumer, relay or something else entirely. In addition, glossy has no dependencies and can be bootstrapped to operate in browser or other non-node.js environments.

Parsing

var syslogParser = require('glossy').Parse; // or wherever your glossy libs are

parsedMessage = syslogParser.parse(message);

parsedMessage will return an object containing as many parsed values as possible, as well as the original message. The date value will be a Date object. Structured data will return as an object. Alternatively, you can give it a callback as your second argument:

syslogParser.parse(message, function(parsedMessage){
    console.log(parsedMessage);
});

Producing

Unless you stipulate for BSD/RFC 3164 style messages, it will default to generating all messages as newer, RFC 5424 format. This might break consumers or relays not expecting it.

var syslogProducer = require('glossy').Produce; // or wherever glossy lives
var glossy = new syslog.Producer({ type: 'BSD' });

var msg = glossy.produce({
    facility: 'local4', // these can either be a valid integer, 
    severity: 'error',  // or a relevant string
    host: 'localhost',
    app_id: 'sudo',
    pid: '123',
    date: new Date(Date()),
    message: 'Nice, Neat, New, Oh Wow'
});

Again, you can specify a callback for the second argument.

var msg = glossy.produce({
    facility: 'ntp', 
    severity: 'info',
    host: 'localhost',
    date: new Date(Date()),
    message: 'Lunch Time!'
}, function(syslogMsg){
    console.log(syslogMsg);
});

In addition, you can also predefined most of the values when you create the object, to save having to repeat yourself:

var glossy = new syslog.Producer({
    type: 'BSD',
    facility: 'ftp',
    pid: 42,
    host: '::1'        
});

For RFC5424 messages, you can also include structured data. Keys should comply with the definition in Section 7, RFC5424 regarding names - keep them unique and your own custom keys should have at least an @ sign.

var msg = glossy.produce({
    facility: 'local4', 
    severity: 'error',
    host: 'localhost',
    app_id: 'starman',
    pid: '123',
    date: new Date(Date()),
    message: 'ACHTUNG!',
    structuredData: {
        'plack@host': {
            status: 'broken',
            hasTried: 'not really'
        }
    }
});

Finally, we expose all the severities as functions themselves:

var infoMsg = glossy.info({
       message: 'Info Message',
});

Function names facilitating this are named debug, info, notice, warn, crit, alert and emergency.

Parsing Example

Handle incoming syslog messages coming in on UDP port 514:

var syslogParser = require('glossy').Parse; // or wherever your glossy libs are
var dgram  = require("dgram");
var server = dgram.createSocket("udp4");

server.on("message", function(rawMessage) {
    syslogParser.parse(rawMessage.toString('utf8', 0), function(parsedMessage){
        console.log(parsedMessage.host + ' - ' + parsedMessage.message);
    });
});

server.on("listening", function() {
    var address = server.address();
    console.log("Server now listening at " + 
        address.address + ":" + address.port);
});

server.bind(514); // Remember ports < 1024 need suid

TODO

Better completion of test suite
Performance analysis and improvements where possible

Author

Squeeks - privacymyass@gmail.com

License

This is free software licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file that should be included with this package.