# REPOST: Musings on Rails and logging philosophies **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [July 6, 2006, 2:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/repost-musings-on-rails-and-logging-philosophies/97343 "2006-07-06T14:17:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/a88e57/32.png) [@jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jay-levitt)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2006, 2:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/repost-musings-on-rails-and-logging-philosophies/97343/1 "2006-07-06T14:17:34Z")
[OK, since I stupidly posted this over the July 4th week[end] and got no responses, let’s try it again…] As a perpetual Rails dabbler, I make an awful lot of typical beginner mistakes. And the logs are always either too verbose or too sparse to help me. And it started me thinking. ## I came from one of the largest production OLTP systems in the world, and the one thing that helped us manage troubleshooting in both development and production was extensive, obsessive, flexible logging. Every operation was logged. Every OS call was followed by an error check and a log message and I mean EVERY call. On Stratus computers, s$sleep returns an error code. In ten years, I never saw it return anything but zero, but you’d better believe that every single s$sleep call was accompanied by a conditional call to our log system. Now, with Ruby’s support for exceptions, such paranoia may not seem warranted. After all, if something wild happens, a subroutine can raise an exception, and it will get propagated back to something that logs it. And it’s true; the need for logging errors is strongly satisfied by exceptions. But errors are only one category of log messages. Warnings are an excellent way to troubleshoot. For any error, I’d usually find four or five related warnings that told me why the error occurred. And for “stepping through” code after the fact, info and debug messages are invaluable. Exceptions can’t help you here. Obviously, you don’t want to pollute the log files with hundreds of messages per second. So following such a “log everything” philosophy requires a powerful log filtering system. It needs to handle multiple source categories - exceptions, debug statements, database queries, controller/action invocation. It needs to understand severity levels. It needs to allow flexible, conditional routing of these messages to a database, log file, live output, or simply its own circular buffer. And it needs a good interface to manage that routing. I think Rick Olsen’s ExceptionLogger is a great step toward such a filtering system, and I’ve volunteered to contribute. But I realized that such an “ActiveLogging” engine would only solve part of the problem. The bigger problem, if you see it as a problem, is that Rails and its applications would need to start logging many more operations. And that would create a dependency on a plugin that’s not likely to become part of core, at least in its current database-dependent state. I think it’s worth the time to create a core ActiveLogger plugin that will handle the message routing, with the defaults set to the existing log files at first. Then plugins, generators or engines could handle things like database output (Rick’s plugin), e-mail notifications (Jamis’s), etc. A bunch of non-invasive, logging-only patches could add the desired logging points to the Rails core. I’d be willing to put in a few hours a day on this. As a Rails novice, I actually have a better feel for what log messages are missing from Rails, because at least once an hour I’m running into something that could use them! But maybe I’m thinking too hard. I have yet to run a true Rails production application, so I don’t know the true needs there. Maybe logging is old-school, and YAGNI. I’ll post this on rails-core if there’s a consensus, but I wanted to get some input first before I start tilting at, well, logging mills. What do folks think? Jay L. ---
**Author:** ![jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/a88e57/32.png) [@jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jay-levitt)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2006, 2:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/repost-musings-on-rails-and-logging-philosophies/97343/2 "2006-07-06T14:39:00Z")
Like you, I’m a rails dabbler with large systems experience. You have my support on this. I find rails current logging to be generally unhelpful. Better logging with plain language messages would be nice. A good logging engine like you suggest is a good start. ---
**Author:** ![jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/a88e57/32.png) [@jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jay-levitt)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2006, 1:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/repost-musings-on-rails-and-logging-philosophies/97343/3 "2006-07-08T01:09:16Z")
I agree. Rails logging is very basic. It would be nice to have a better system. Richard [RogueWaveMarine.com](http://RogueWaveMarine.com) ---
**Author:** ![jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/a88e57/32.png) [@jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jay-levitt)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2006, 5:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/repost-musings-on-rails-and-logging-philosophies/97343/4 "2006-07-08T05:04:24Z")
> But maybe I’m thinking too hard. I have yet to run a true Rails production > application, so I don’t know the true needs there. Maybe logging is > old-school, and YAGNI. I’ll post this on rails-core if there’s a > consensus, but I wanted to get some input first before I start tilting at, > well, logging mills. > > What do folks think? > > Jay L. +1 But if you do need it, by all means work on it. For what it’s worth, you might look at the syslog logger that robot coop did. It may give you some ideas on how to provide extended logging capabilities as an addon: [http://dev.robotcoop.com/Tools/](http://dev.robotcoop.com/Tools/) ---
**Author:** ![jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/a88e57/32.png) [@jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jay-levitt)\ **Post date:** [July 9, 2006, 5:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/repost-musings-on-rails-and-logging-philosophies/97343/5 "2006-07-09T17:01:22Z")
On Fri, 7 Jul 2006 22:01:13 -0500, Rick O. wrote: > But if you do need it, by all means work on it. For what it’s worth, > you might look at the syslog logger that robot coop did. It may give > you some ideas on how to provide extended logging capabilities as an > addon: [http://dev.robotcoop.com/Tools/](http://dev.robotcoop.com/Tools/) Rick, Thanks for the semi-encouragement 🙂 The big problem, I think, is that for such an extension to be useful and widely used, Rails itself needs a lot more logging. I could do a proof-of-concept version that overrides some key Rails routines to wrap them in log messages, but this doesn’t start to get really interesting until it’s actually into core, which is why I was sending up a trial balloon. I’m actually more interested to hear your (and similar) viewpoints than those who agree with me - what facets of Rails do you feel have eliminated the need for such verbose logging? Jay ---
**Author:** ![jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/a88e57/32.png) [@jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jay-levitt)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2006, 4:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/repost-musings-on-rails-and-logging-philosophies/97343/6 "2006-07-10T16:45:15Z")
What about log4r? It seems to be a framework ready to solve all of the problems you mentioned… ---
**Author:** ![jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/a88e57/32.png) [@jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jay-levitt)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2006, 10:06am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/repost-musings-on-rails-and-logging-philosophies/97343/7 "2006-07-12T10:06:46Z")
Yes, if log4r is half as flexible as log4j, it should be flexible enough for what the OP is describing. Ken ---
**Author:** ![jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/a88e57/32.png) [@jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jay-levitt)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2006, 11:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/repost-musings-on-rails-and-logging-philosophies/97343/8 "2006-07-12T23:26:34Z")
On Wed, 12 Jul 2006 10:03:39 +0200, Kenneth L. wrote: > Yes, if log4r is half as flexible as log4j, it should be flexible enough > for what the OP is describing. > > Ken > > Robert J. wrote: > > > What about log4r? It seems to be a framework ready to solve all of the > > problems you mentioned… logr4 is wonderful! I don’t know how I missed it. I think my ideal solution would be to: - Redirect Rails Logger into log4r - Create a web admin page for log4r like Rick’s exception logger - Wrap it all up into a plugin or engine. Once I do that, then I will come back and take up the cause of how to get better logging rolled into the core itself - I don’t feel that this should stay in a plugin forever, for both technical and, er, “moral” reasons, but I realize that creating even an optional dependency on log4r could be problematic for Rails. If anyone’s interested in collaborating with me, drop me a line at “jay at jay dot eff-emm”. Jay L.