LittleLogFriend is no longer actively maintained in favour to: Yell - Your Extensible Logging Library
Although it is still a good replacement for Ruby's standard Logger in the smaller scale, you might want to take a look at Yell, or jump directly into the Wiki, for a logging solution with some extra whiz-bang!
LittleLogFriend
LittleLogFriend sets your standard logger to a more readable format, like so:
logger = Logger.new STDOUT
logger.info 'hello world'
#=> 2009-01-14 10:10:10 [ INFO] 15356 : hello world
The format is: DATE TIME [ LOG LEVEL ] PID : MESSAGE
Installation
The Gem Version
System wide:
gem install little_log_friend
Or in your Gemfile:
gem 'little_log_friend'
You should create an initializer file in order to get LittleLogFriend to work for you, like so:
# config/initializers/little_log_friend.rb (create it if not present)
require 'little_log_friend
The Plugin Version
script/plugin install git://github.com/rudionrails/little_log_friend.git
You don't need to specifically require little_log_friend, the init.rb of the plugin will take care of it.
Usage
LittleLogFriend will automatically enhance your standard logger with a nicer log formatting - nothing more. Instead of the regular format, you will see every log message starting with a nice timestamp and a better formatted message altogether. This will help you to trace your logs much easier in case something goes happens. Moreover, if you are using monitoring tools to detect errors in you logs so that they send out notifications to your sysadmin, a unified logging format will significantly ease this process.
Additionally to that, you can add this to your environment.rb:
LittleLogFriend.colorize!
This will enable colorized log output (under Unix). Every log level will appear in a different color to ease log interpretation. Here are the colors for each severity:
debug => green info => white warn => yello error => red fatal => purple unknown => white default => default of the console / none
Also, you can override the default color settings, like so:
LittleLogFriend.colorize!( :info => "\033[01;36m" ) # cyan for Unix
Specify the keys as explained above for the default severity colors.
Additional Notes
LittleLogFriend is not meant to be a fully featured log solution, but it's supposed to help in the smaller scale and especially when developing.
Also, you probably don't want to use colorized logging in production mode, as it will be very difficult to read the log file on a remote server with all the color information in it.
Copyright (c) 2009 - 2012 Rudolf Schmidt, released under the MIT license