App Logging — loggers • fiery

fiery has a build in logging mechanism that lets you capture event information however you like. Every user-injested warnings and errors are automatically captured by the logger along with most system errors as well. fiery tries very hard not to break due to faulty app logic. This means that any event handler error will be converted to an error log without fiery stopping. In the case of request handlers a 500L response will be send back if any error is encountered.

logger_null()

logger_console(format = "{time} - {event}: {message}")

logger_file(file, format = "{time} - {event}: {message}")

logger_switch(..., default = logger_null())

common_log_format

combined_log_format

Format

An object of class character of length 1.

Arguments

format: A glue string specifying the format of the log entry
file: A file or connection to write to
...: A named list of loggers to use for different events. The same semantics as switch is used so it is possible to let events fall through e.g. logger_switch(error =, warning = logger_file('errors.log')).
default: A catch-all logger for use with events not defined in ...

Setting a logger

By default, fiery uses logger_null() which forwards warning and error messages to stderr() and ignores any other logging events. To change this behavior, set a different logger using the set_logger() method:

app$set_logger(logger)

where logger is a function taking at least the following arguments: event, message, request, time, and ....

fiery comes with some additional loggers, which either writes all logs to a file or to the console. A new instance of the file logger can be created with logger_file(file):

app$set_logger(logger_file('fiery_log.log'))

A new instance of the console logger can be create with logger_console():

app$set_logger(logger_console())

Both functions takes a format a argument that lets you customise how the log is written. Furthermore the console logger will style the logs with colour coding depending on the content if the console supports it.

As a last possibility it is possible to use different loggers dependent on the event by using the switch logger:

app$set_logger(logger_switch(warning =, 
                             error = logger_file('errors.log),
                             default = logger_file('info.log')))

Automatic logs

fiery logs a number of different information by itself describing its operations during run. The following events are send to the log:

start: Will be send when the server starts up
resume: Will be send when the server is resumed
stop: Will be send when the server stops
request: Will be send when a request has been handled. The message will contain information about how long time it took to handle the request or if it was denied.
websocket: Will be send every time a WebSocket connection is established or closed as well as when a message is received or send
message: Will be send every time a message is emitted by an event handler or delayed execution handler
warning: Will be send everytime a warning is emitted by an event handler or delayed execution handler
error: Will be send everytime an error is signaled by an event handler or delayed execution handler. In addition some internal functions will also emit error event when exceptions are encountered

By default only message, warning and error events will be logged by sending them to the error stream as a message().

Access Logs

Of particular interest are logs that detail requests made to the server. These are the request events detailed above. There are different standards for how requests are logged. fiery uses the Common Log Format by default, but this can be modified by setting the access_log_format field to a glue expression that has access to the following variables:

start_time: The time the request was recieved
end_time: The time the response was send back
request: The Request object
response: The Response object
id: The client id

To change the format:

app$access_log_format <- combined_log_format

Custom logs

Apart from the standard logs described above it is also possible to send messages to the log as you please, e.g. inside event handlers. This is done through the log() method where you at the very least specify an event and a message. In general it is better to send messages through log() rather than with warning() and stop() even though the latters will eventually be caught, as it gives you more control over the logging and what should happen in the case of an exception.

An example of using log() in a handler could be:

app$on('header', function(server, id, request) {
  server$log('info', paste0('request from ', id, ' received'), request)
})

Which would log the timepoint the headers of a request has been recieved.