[Feature Enhancement] - v10.x - Support logging to file

[judimator]

Hi there,

During my work I found the following issue

Env:

• pact-php: 10.0.0-alpha2
• phpunit: 10.3.4

Step to reproduce:

• Set PACT_LOG var (for example ./log/pact.log)
• Run a test

Expected result:
The file exists

Actual result:
The file not found

[tienvx]

Hi @judimator , thanks for reporting the issue.

After a quick look at pact-reference and pact-php (version 10 alpha) projects, I think:

• Currently only PACT_LOGLEVEL is supported
• PACT_LOG is the code leftover from version 9, and it does not do anything, and should be removed
• This code can provide similar behavior, but I didn't implement it yet. I think we can find a way to use it in the future alpha version

cc @YOU54F Thanks for the useful code . Do you know how pact's implementation in other languages handle this one?

[YOU54F]

Hey,

Pact-JS doesn't support logging to file at the moment ( I made a draft PR here pact-foundation/pact-js-core#428)

The current interface between the ffi for init'ing with the logger is here

https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-js-core/blob/master/native/ffi.cc#L12

There are some convenience functions to setup a logger

https://docs.rs/pact_ffi/latest/pact_ffi/log/index.html

• pactffi_log_to_buffer Convenience function to direct all logging to a task local memory buffer.
• pactffi_log_to_file⚠ Convenience function to direct all logging to a file.
• pactffi_log_to_stderr Convenience function to direct all logging to stderr.
• pactffi_log_to_stdout Convenience function to direct all logging to stdout.

I believe these call logger_apply, where as calling pactffi_logger_attach_sink allows you to setup multiple loggers, prior to calling pactffi_logger_apply

I did notice that once you've called pactffi_logger_apply you can't change the logger settings within the same process, so you change the log level or mode for a particular test (it caused me issues when trying to test pact-python with the ffi, where there were unit tests that tested log levels)

Further examples

• Logging Example in Pact Ref
• GoLang

[YOU54F]

in my pr for pact python i tried this out to set the log level at init time, depending on the env vars presented by the user

https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-python/pull/367/files#diff-c666652e61742bd29834872c24326ac8e8ff8be3ed3d645fe596968ed9013938R66

instructions

https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-python/pull/367/files#diff-b059f16e86de3ca400fc1d0b7a623bb0aa703cd3357d45dc0cc931b7f3f0a3e3R148

so it can easily be controlled externally to dump to a file, buffer etc or set a log level. that code shown only sets up one logger sink though, so if your code relies on pulling anything back from a log buffer and it’s instead been setup with a file or stdout, the data won’t be present.

it will probably be implemented differently in the end but might be worth sharing :)