com.stuartsierra / log.dev

I read the Logback manual so you don't have to.

Quick-start logging setup for Java or Clojure development using SLF4J and Logback.

This does not provide a logging API. It just provides the necessary dependencies and configuration to get all the log messages going to the same place.

This is intended as a quick way to get logging set up in a new project, or as an example to follow when configuring logging in your own project. It is probably not suitable for production use.

Releases and dependency information

Latest stable release is 0.2.0

Releases are on Clojars

Leiningen dependency information:

[com.stuartsierra/log.dev "0.2.0"]

Maven dependency information:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.stuartsierra</groupId>
  <artifactId>log.dev</artifactId>
  <version>0.2.0</version>
</dependency>

Gradle dependency information:

compile "com.stuartsierra:log.dev:0.2.0"

Note on Logback totalSizeCap

log.dev currently depends on Logback 1.1.7, which includes support for the totalSizeCap property to limit the total size of log files. See Automatic expiration, below.

However, as described in LOGBACK-1166, the total size limit is not applied to the two most recent "periods" of logs. As a result, the total space occupied by logs can still grow without bound within a single day.

Logback 1.1.8 drops the "untouchable periods" behavior, but also introduces LOGBACK-1236 which causes spurious warning messages to be printed to the console on startup. There is a fix for this issue scheduled to be included in Logback 1.1.9.

What this means for you

If you want a real limit on log file size, configure your project to depend on:

[ch.qos.logback/logback-classic "1.1.8"]
[ch.qos.logback/logback-core "1.1.8"]

But if you do this, you will get spurious INFO and WARN messages printed to the console when your app starts up, such as "SizeAndTimeBasedFNATP is deprecated. Use SizeAndTimeBasedRollingPolicy instead".

Or you can wait until Logback 1.1.9 is released with fixes both issues. See Logback News for release announcements.

Configuration

Add this library as a dependency to your project.

Exclusions

Add exclusions for all other logging implementations that might be in the transitive dependencies of your project.

See :exclusions in log.dev's project.clj file for an example.

Local config file

Add a file named log_dev_app.properties to your project's resources, at the root of the classpath, containing the following property:

app_root_logger=com.example.your.application

Replace com.example.your.application with the top-level namespace of your project.

Usage

In your application code, use whatever logging API you prefer, such as clojure.tools.logging or SLF4J.

Where are my logs?

Console logging

Only log messages at levels WARN and ERROR will be printed to the console (STDOUT). These messages may or may not be visible in an interactive shell or REPL, depending on your development tooling and configuration.

Output file: log/app.log

If you set up the properties file as described above in Configuration, all log messages from your application code will be written to the file log/app.log relative to the working directory in which your program was started.

Output file: log/all.log

All log messages from all namespaces and packages (your application code plus all libraries) will be written out to a file log/all.log relative to the working directory in which your program was started.

Any Java or Clojure code using any of the following logging APIs will have their log messages written via Logback:

• SLF4J
• Log4j 1
• Log4j 2
• Commons Logging
• OSGI LogService
• See note below about java.util.logging

Automatic log file rotation

Each log file will be rotated daily and every time it reaches 64 MB in size.

Rotated log files will be named like log/all.YYYY-MM-DD.N.log where YYYY-MM-DD is the date and N is a sequence number.

The current log files are always log/app.log and log/all.log but they may be replaced by new files due to rotation. So if you are monitoring those files with another program, for example tail -f, you may need to restart the monitor every time a file is rotated.

Automatic expiration

The amount of disk space used by log files is limited to:

• 512 MB total for app*.log files
• 512 MB total for all*.log files

This adds up to an overall maximum of 1 GB for all log files.

When the total size of the current and rotated log files exceeds these limits, the oldest files will be deleted.

Any log files more than 15 days old will be deleted automatically.

Additional notes

All levels enabled

All logging levels are enabled in this configuration.

Performance

This log configuration is verbose and synchronous. This is good for visibility during development but bad for performance.

Do not use log.dev if you are optimizing or benchmarking code which does any logging.

java.util.logging

If any code or library in your project uses the java.util.logging APIs, you will need to initialize the SLF4J bridge by doing the following when your application starts.

In Java:

import org.slf4j.bridge.SLF4JBridgeHandler;
//...
SLF4JBridgeHandler.removeHandlersForRootLogger();
SLF4JBridgeHandler.install();

In Clojure:

(import (org.slf4j.bridge SLF4JBridgeHandler))

(SLF4JBridgeHandler/removeHandlersForRootLogger)
(SLF4JBridgeHandler/install)

See the SLF4JBridgeHandler documentation for details.

Customizing

You will probably want to customize the logging configuration for production use. To do that, remove log.dev from your project's dependencies and replace it with your custom configuration.

Refer to project.clj for an example of how to configure your dependencies to forward all log APIs via SLF4J to Logback.

Refer to resources/logback.xml for an example of how to configure Logback.

Copyright and License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright © 2014 Stuart Sierra

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.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.