Excessive logging in Rails console makes it unusable

[steveclarke]

Description

When running Rails console in non-development, Honeybadger outputs excessive plugin initialization logs that make the console nearly unusable. Even with debug: false in honeybadger.yml, dozens of lines like these appear:

** [Honeybadger] skip plugin name=karafka reason=requirement level=0 pid=10 at="lib/honeybadger/plugin.rb:257:in 'Honeybadger::Plugin#load!'"
** [Honeybadger] skip plugin name=lambda reason=requirement level=0 pid=10 at="lib/honeybadger/plugin.rb:257:in 'Honeybadger::Plugin#load!'"
** [Honeybadger] skip plugin name=local_variables reason=requirement level=0 pid=10 at="lib/honeybadger/plugin.rb:257:in 'Honeybadger::Plugin#load!'"

Environment

• Honeybadger gem version: 5.27.1
• Rails version: 8.0.2
• Ruby version: 3.4.1

Steps to reproduce

1. Add Honeybadger to a Rails app
2. Set log_level to INFO in development
3. Run rails console

Workaround

I found that completely replacing the logger (rather than changing log levels) works:

# config/initializers/honeybadger.rb
if defined?(Rails::Console)
  require "logger"
  null_logger = Logger.new(File::NULL)

  Honeybadger.configure do |config|
    config.logger = null_logger
  end
end

Is this the appropriate workaround? It would be helpful to note this in your documentation specifically for console environments, as it's not intuitive that replacing the logger is needed rather than configuring log levels.

Expected behavior

No or minimal initialization logs in the console.

Actual behavior

Dozens of plugin initialization logs appear, making the console difficult to use.

Attempted solutions

• Setting debug: false in honeybadger.yml doesn't help
• Using ENV vars like HONEYBADGER_INSIGHTS_ENABLED=false doesn't help
• Setting HONEYBADGER_PLUGINS=[] doesn't help

Related issues

This appears related to #375 "Use Honeybadger logging.level setting when logging to Rails log" which has been open since 2020.

(edit: changed "When running Rails console in development" to "When running Rails console in non-development")

[stympy]

@roelbondoc I think you did some work on the logging a month or so ago... do you want to chime in on this?

[steveclarke]

I just realized that I said when running it in development mode, but I meant to say non-development mode. This primarily surfaces in my staging and production environments when I'm running rails console to do some one-offs.

[roelbondoc]

Thanks for writing up the issue @steveclarke.

While your workaround should work, you could also set the logging.path configuration for the gem to /dev/null.

If you are able to set the environment variable before loading the rails console you can use HONEYBADGER_LOGGING_PATH=/dev/null, or set it to an actual file path if you still want to keep the output.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into adding something in our documentation about logging in console environments.