Logging::Plugins::Rtail

This is an "Appender" for the Logging gem, to allow you to forward Logs directly to an Rtail Service.

Normally, you'd use the Rtail client to read logs from another process (e.g. tail -F process.log | rtail --name WildTest) but this Gem allows you to send the logs directly.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'logging'
gem 'logging-rtail'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install logging-rtail

The Logging gem uses little-plugger gem to manage extending Logger. This means it will automatically load and initialise the logging-rtail code as soon as it loads the Logging code.

To configure Logging to use Rtail, you simply have to add the appender to your configuring of Logging.

e.g. The following will send the "Wootles" log-output to STDERR and the Rtail service running on the localhost:

l = Logging.logger["The Wild Wild Test"]
l.add_appenders(
  Logging.appenders.stderr,
  Logging.appenders.rtail("Wild Test stream")
)

l.info "Wootles"

The default host is localhost and port is 9999, as per Rtail's defaults.

If you want to connect to an Rtail service on a different host or port, pass the host or port options to the rtail appender factory:

l.add_appenders(
  Logging.appenders.rtail("Wild Test stream", host: "other.host.nowhere", port: 10010)
)

The Rtail server seems to output Timestamps in UTC uncomprimisingly, rather than localtime. This can make it a little confusing when watching the logs if you don't live in the UK.

As a work-around, you can enable the option omit_timezone to the Rtail appender, and it will drop TZ information from the Timestamp it sends to the Rtail server:

l.add_appenders(
  Logging.appenders.rtail("Wild Test stream", omit_timezone: true)
)

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in lib/logging/plugins/rtail.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

I track major "To Do's" in a TODO.org file.

I track context-sensitive and minor ones with TODO and FIXME comments in the source code.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/fairfaxmedia/logging-rtail.