yajl

Yajl - Version 0.2.1

Yet another JSON logger. I like Ruby's logger, but it's annoying to always set it up. I like flexible, machine and human readable logs. I want simplicity and brevity. I want to dump JSON in my logs without screwing around, and I want to be able to easily log text. I don't want to be constantly setting progname. I want to be able to override the right things (like progrname) but I also always want UTC and overriding id's is overkill.

TODOs

• Tests. I guess. Maybe.
• Maybe rewrite this in Nim and wrap it in the Ruby FFI. I'd have to be logging a lot to justify it though.
• Maybe make it Windows friendly. (Not sure how to handle newlines for Windows).

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'yajl'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install yajl

Usage

Yajl relies on git to determine what the root filepath is. Since every single project that I have uses git, I decided to just make it mandatory.

cd [git repo] && irb

require 'yajl'

logger = Yajl.create_logger
logger.warn "danger"

Will produce the following (although it has been pretty printed for readability):

{
	"id": "44fa7a8f0186092d849ac1ea263ceb3f",
	"severity": "WARN",
	"datetime": "2015-08-24 18:22:12 UTC",
	"progname": "(irb)",
	"message": {
		"text": "danger"
	}
}

Note that progname is normally set from the context of the root git directory. E.g., lib/yajl/version.rb.

You can also log data structures:

require 'yajl'

logger = Yajl.create_logger
interesting_data = { banana_count: 2345, text: "So many bananas!" }
logger.info interesting_data

Which produces:

{
	"datetime": "2015-08-24 18:43:24 UTC",
	"id": "4ae209a739a7bb562d7b55dfba88fc4e",
	"message": {
		"banana_count": 2345,
		"text": "So many bananas!"
	},
	"progname": "(irb)",
	"severity": "INFO"
}

And because it is just a normal Ruby logger, you can also do:

require 'yajl'

logger = Yajl.create_logger
logger.fatal("deathstar") { "Nooooo" }

Which overrides the progname attribute.

{
	"datetime": "2015-08-24 18:48:37 UTC",
	"id": "3e6dfcc2038dd0dec5e4be21574cb76d",
	"message": {
		"text": "Nooooo"
	},
	"progname": "deathstar",
	"severity": "FATAL"
}

By default logs are stored in ~/logs with a very sensible logger name. If even one person wants the ability to change the filename that is set I'll add the support to do so. Right now it looks like this (Where yajl would be the name of whatever git repo you are using):

/home/zach/logs/[e-mail]

or like this:

/home/zach/logs/[e-mail].1

If there are multiple running processes (just like the normal Ruby logger).

Note, it gets the name of the project from your Git project name. If you don't use Git let me know and I'll make this toggleable too.

Development

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.

Stuff that only I need to do

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.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/zachaysan/yajl. Matz is nice. Be like Matz.

License

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