RF Logger provides a consistent API to log events of different severity levels. Severities include:

    :debug # dev-only, for exploring issues
    :info  # end users, to audit process
    :warn  # weird thing happened, but isn't really an issue
    :error # someone fix the code
    :fatal # system-wide errors

The API provides helper methods for each severity (i.e. Logger.debug). In addition to logging severity levels, the following fields are optional:

• actor (The user or caller of the event that you are logging)
• action (The event you are logging)
• target_type (We use this in cases where we want to tie a log record to a particular entity or object in the database, for example User)
• target_id (This is used in conjunction with target_type, as the unique identifier for the relevant entity)
• metadata (Additional information such as error details and backtraces or other messages, stored as a hash)

This gem includes RfLogger::SimpleLogger and RfLogger::Sequel logger as two options that adhere to this API. The fields above should be passed into helper methods as a hash.

Configuration

Configuration mostly sets up additional notifications beyond the actual logging.

RfLogger.configure do |c|
  # environment attempts to determine this for Rails, Sinatra, Padrino, and Rory, but is otherwise
  c.environment = 'production'  required
  # fields from above can be interpolated into the notification subject
  c.notification_subject = "Oh no!  An error of {{level}} severity just occurred."
  c.set_notifier_list do |n|
    c.add_notifier Notification::DefinedElsewhere, :levels => [:error], :except => ['test', 'development']
    c.add_notifier Notification::OhNo, :levels => [:fatal, :error], :only => ['production']
    c.add_notifer Notifcation:VeryVerbose
  end
end

As you seen above, you can specify different notifications for different levels or environments whend you log an event.

Notification

While you have to implement notifiers yourself, the API is fairly simple. The class must respond to .send_notification. The argument passed in is an object that includes a #subject (which can be defined in the configuration (see above), and #details, which is the metadata in YAML format. Future versions of this may allow for other transformations of the log data.

Example:

require 'tinder'
module Notification
  class Campfire
    class << self
      def send_error_notification log_info
        message = log_info.subject + "\n" + log_info.details
        post_message message
      end

      def post_message message
        campfire = Tinder::Campfire.new(config['user'], :token => config['api_token'])
        room = campfire.find_room_by_id(config['room_id'])
        room.paste message
      end

      def config
        @config ||= YAML.load_file(File.join(Rails.root, 'config/campfire.yml'))
      end
    end
  end
end