OctoLog

Go logging for human-beings.

Features

• easy to use, works out-of-the-box
• logging in and filtering by log-levels
• POSIX compliant routing of warnings and errors to STDERR
• straight-forward configuration, optionally via YAML file parsed at startup
• ANSII colors (that are automatically disabled when the output is not a terminal)
• highly customizable

---

Installation

go get github.com/octogo/log

Quickstart

Use the included CLI tool to create a Go source file:

# install octolog CLI tool
go install github.com/octogo/log/cmd/octolog

# generate a sample source file
octolog gensrc -h

# view it
cat log.go

Usage

Before using OctoLog it has to initialize itself. The Init() func will ensure that the default outputs and standard logger are made available and that the configuration is loaded correctly, if present.

package main

import "github.com/octogo/log"

func main() {
  // initialize octolog package
  log.Init()
}

Then you can simply use it like you would use the builtin log package:

log.Log("Hello world!")
log.Fatal("FATALITY")

Above code produces an output similar to this:

2019/10/31 04:20:23 main INFO Hello world!
2019/10/31 04:20:23 main ERROR FATALITY
exit status 1

If you want more granular control over the log-levels of your messages, simply use the standard logger or initialize your own log.Logger{}.

logger := log.New(
  "myapp",  // unique name of the logger
  nil,      // []level.Level of log-levels to whitelist (nil implies *all*)
  // if no Outputs are specified, the logger will be initialized with the
  // DefaultOutputs set as its outputs. But you could easily configure the
  // Logger to log into a custom log file by specifying 'file://my.log' here.
  )
logger.Debug("Debug message...")
logger.Info("Info...")
logger.Notice("Notification...")
logger.Warning("Warning...")
logger.Error("Error...")

2019/10/13 04:09:33 myapp INFO Info...
2019/10/13 04:09:33 myapp NOTICE Notification...
2019/10/13 04:09:33 myapp WARNING Warning...
2019/10/13 04:09:33 myapp ERROR Error...

Note: The log-entry with log-level DEBUG is not shown in the output. That's because none of the default outputs is configured to log DEBUG level. See Configuration section below for more details.

Gotta log them ALL

The function signatures do not force you to log strings:

// signature of log.Log
func Log(interface{}) {}
// signature of log.Logf
func Logf(string, ...interface{}) {}
// signature of log.Logger.Error
func (Logger) Error(interface{}) {}
// signature of log.Logger.Errorf
func (Logger) Errorf(string ...interface{}) {}
// and so on...

Of course you can simply log native strings or any fmt.Stringer, if you like.

Redaction

Sometimes it is desirable to have more control over how an object is redacted when being logged. If a logged value satisfies the log.Redactor interface, the return-value of its Redacted() function will be logged instead of its native string representation.

// Redactor is defined as something providing a Redacted() function.
type Redactor interface {
  Redacted() string
}

See examples/redacted/main.go for more information.

---

Configuration

There is a special initialization phase during start-up that takes care of loading a possibly existing configuration file, but almost everything can easily be configured during run-time, even after initialization phase.

import "github.com/octogo/log/pkg/config"

log.InitWithConfig(&config.Config{
  // all internal variables can be set here and then passed
  // to octolog during initialization phase.
})

See pkg/config/config.go for more information.

---

Configuration via Simple Textfile

OctoLog can be configured with a simple YAML file that is placed in the current working directory. This enables users of prebuilt binaries to configure logging without having to rebuild the Go source.

This repository includes a tool for creating configuration file templates with lots of comments and examples that work out-of-the-box.

Simply run:

# install octolog CLI tool
go install github.com/octogo/log/cmd/octolog

# create a sample configuration file `./logging.yml`
octolog genconf

See octolog genconf -h for usage details.