Outland::TagRunes

The Outland TagRunes gem adds unicode glyphs to the Rails logger output that encode the session and request id in a way that occupies a minimum of visual space but provides very useful debugging capabilities.

For example, it is easy to grep for a single session's log output, or the log output for a complete request, even if many requests are interleaved into the same log file.

Beyond the debugging capabilities, TagRunes tries to keep the log file output pleasant to work with by only occupying 10 columns of text. It uses unicode to encode a full byte of data into each column position in a visually clear way.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'outland-tag_runes'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install outland-tag_runes

In your initialization, add:

config.log_tags = [ Outland::TagRunes.rails_tag ]

Your log output will look something like the following.

[★¿xÄ ϱm] Completed 200 OK in 78ms (Views: 0.7ms | ActiveRecord: 72.6ms)

The format is:

[<encoded session id> <encoded request id>]

So to look at a user's complete session log output, do the following:

grep "<encoded session id>" production.log

Or for a particular request:

grep "<encoded request id>" production.log

The tag is added to the Rack environment, so tools like Airbrake will contain it in their exception environment information. You can therefore look at a recorded exception and quickly produce the entire log output for that request.

The gem also wraps the standard Rails log formatter so that multiline log messages will be tagged properly on each line.

The glyphs were chosen for legibility in OSX terminal fonts.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. 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 version.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.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/outland/tag_runes.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.