WatchTower-CI-Logging

WatchTower is a CodeIgniter library for writing to (and automatically generating) a series of log files with the option of notifying an admin when the SHTF.

Most applications I work on have some very distinct areas of functionality that require logging on their own. I wanted to make this as simple as possible. By configuring a few logging "streams" (ie basically a list of log files) WatchTower will create these log files for you and you can log to each one by just specifying the stream and a message. If your application does a large amount of logging, an option is available to have WatchTower automatically create a month or day specific log file instead of one single very large log file.

Too many applications I come across have very limited logging implemented and it can make diagnosing issues very difficult. Hopefully by making logging easy, it will happen more often.

Installation

The Library

Simply copy the WatchTower.php library file to your application/libraries folder. From there you'll want to add it to the autoloader ( application/config/autoload.php ) in the libraries array.

$autoload['libraries'] = array("WatchTower");

Configuration

WatchTower requires an entry in the config file to set up the relevant log files. So copy/paste and edit the below config line into your CodeIgniter config file ( application/config/config.php ).

/**
 * WatchTower configuration
 */
$config['watchtower'] = array(
    "logDir"        => BASEPATH . "../watchtower-logs",
    "whoToNotify"   => array("you@your-domain.com"), # Each email in this array will be notified
    "streams"       => array("registration", "web-service"), # Each of these streams will have a .log file generated for them
    "timeFormat"    => "Y-m-d G:i:s", # You can override the log entry time format if you wish
    "storageMode"   => "monthly" # Options: "single", "monthly", "daily". WatchTower can split logs into monthly or daily files if you prefer.
);

Usage

Once that initial setup is done, logging becomes very very simple.

Basic logging

Logging is very straightforward. The first parameter specifies which log/stream you want to write into. The second parameter is the message to put in the log file (automatically prepended with a date/time in the format specified in the config file).

# Note the first parameter is the logging stream (ie an individual log)
$this->watchtower->log("registration", "Oh no. Steve tried to enrol again. Don't worry, we stopped him!");

Sending a notification email out when an error is logged.

If you want to notify the email addresses specified in the config file, supply a third parameter of true.

# Note the third parameter is now "true". This is the "Notify" parameter.
$this->watchtower->log("registration", "Oh no. Steve tried to enrol again. Don't worry, we stopped him!", true);

Dumping debugging data into the log

In some instances you'll likely be wanting to dump an array or object into a log. A method has been added into the logger to make this easy.

$o = new stdClass();
$o->one   = 1;
$o->two   = 2;
$o->three = 3;
            
$this->watchtower->log("registration", "Log an object: " . $this->watchtower->dumpVarToString($o));