Treefell

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Treefell is a minimalist debug-logging library for ruby. It uses the DEBUG environment variable to determine which debug messages are logged and which are suppressed.

This project was inspired by visionmedia's debug library for nodejs.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'treefell'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install treefell

Usage

Take the ruby program:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'treefell'

foo_debug = Treefell['foo']
foo_debug.puts 'too funky in here'

bar_debug = Treefell['bar']
bar_debug.puts 'you got that right'

baz_debug = Treefell['baz']
baz_debug.puts 'say it again'

Each call to Treefell['...'] instantiates a DebugLogger for the provided namespace (e.g. foo, bar, baz).

By default no debug log statements are displayed:

> ruby program.rb

Displaying all messages

You can tell it to display all messages with the wildcard *:

Displaying messages from a particular namespace

Here's how to display messages for one specific debugging namespace:

Displaying messages for multiple namespaces

To display messages from multiple namespaces use a comma-separated list of namespaces:

Colored output

Every namespace gets a color associated with it to aide in the visual parsing of the output. Also DebugLogger(s) are cached per namespace so regardless of when you refer to the namespace it will always have the same color associated with it.

E.g.

foo_debug = Treefell['foo']
other_foo_debug = Treefell['foo']

foo_debug.eql?(other_foo_debug) # => true

Sending to IO other than STDOUT

By default all messages are written to STDOUT. You can change this by instantiating a debug logger using the debug method, e.g.:

foo_debug = Treefell.debug('foo', io: some_io)
foo_debug.puts 'Get up offa that thing, and dance till you feel better'

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/zdennis/treefell/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request