onelog

Batteries-included logging for Clojure. Covers the 80% case of all logging in a process going to one file.

Features

• One function call sets up logging with sane defaults - just (start!) and you're ready to go.
• Daily log rotation out of the box.
• (start! "/foo/bar.log") to log to a different file.
• Convenience methods for logging stacktraces, throwables, and nested throwable root causes.
• Warnings and errors are ANSI-colorized.
• Wraps log4j under the hood. Compatible with any log4j customizations you'd care to make.

Usage

Basic logging

Add the following dependency to your project.clj:

[onelog "0.4.5"]

You can now require Onelog and start logging:

user> (require '[onelog.core :as log])
nil
user> (log/start!)
true
user> (log/error "Hello, world!")
nil
user> (slurp "log/clojure.log")
"2014-04-09 13:12:08,003 [ERROR] : [0mHello, world![0m\n"

The default logger logs to a file called log/clojure.log with a timestamp and the log level prepended. Error messages are colored bright red, warning messages are bright yellow, and everything else is uncolored.

Logging to a different file

user> (log/start! "/tmp/foo.log")
true
user> (log/error "A different logfile")
nil
user> (slurp "/tmp/foo.log")
"2014-04-09 13:18:25,845 [ERROR] : [0mA different logfile[0m\n"

Changing the logfile after startup

start! attempts to be idempotent; subsequent calls after the first one have no effect unless the force argument is true. If you want to change the global logfile after calling start!, you have to use the 3 argument version and set force to true:

user> (log/start! "/tmp/bar.log" :info true)
true
user> (log/error "Hi")
nil
user> (slurp "/tmp/bar.log")
"2014-04-09 13:19:22,103 [ERROR] : [0mHi[0m\n"

Copying log messages to STDOUT

Appending a + (plus sign) to the standard logging functions will copy the messages to STDOUT in addition to logging them to the log file:

user> (log/info+ "ABC 123")
ABC 123
nil
user> (log/warn+ "DEF 456")
DEF 456
nil

Logging exceptions and stack traces

A convenience method is provided to transform a throwable into a printable stacktrace. If the exception has a cause exception embedded in it, it walks the chain of causes until it finds the root exception and logs that, too.

user> (log/error (log/throwable (Exception. "A test exception")))
nil
user> (println (slurp "/tmp/foo.log"))
2014-04-09 13:46:49,097 [ERROR] : java.lang.Exception: A test exception
user$eval9828.invoke(NO_SOURCE_FILE:1)
clojure.lang.Compiler.eval(Compiler.java:6703)
clojure.lang.Compiler.eval(Compiler.java:6666)
clojure.core$eval.invoke(core.clj:2927)
[...]

Complex logging situations

Onelog is designed to cover the 80% use case: log everything that happens in an app to one file. Onelog is specifically not intended for the other 20% of cases where you have more complex logging requirements (although most of its functions are compatible with more complex scenarios.)

If you have more complex logging needs, such as multiple logfiles for different parts of your app, you are probably better off using clj-logging-config directly to set up your loggers. It may be helpful to look at the Onelog source code to get an idea of how to wrangle the logging configuration. You can still use the Onelog functions as usual once you set up your logging backend.

License

Copyright © 2013-2014 Paul Legato.

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.