Applications, especially ones that run over and over again with zero persistancy (of the application itself) like a web app needs logging. It’s important to be able to log different types of messages to different places and fortunately Zend_Log is so extensible that it can log to almost anything you can think of.
My typically logging setup consists of multiple log writers configured in Zend_Log to allow me to control where and how certain messages get logged.
Broken down into logging levels I usually have ‘debug’, ‘info’, ‘notice’ all sent to a single file and not enabled in production.
Warnings and Errors are usually considered runtime-issues that are not “omg! it’s broken!” issues, so they get logged to a file and are enabled on production. The last three levels, ‘alert’, ‘crit’, ’emerg’ are all considered to be top priority – aka – your application is failing. And as such these get logged to a file and emailed immediately to a person of importance.
In all cases, in my development environment, all log messages utilize Zend’s Firebug support.
Fortunately Zend_Log supports all this complexity with a very simple set of configuration options.
It’s all done with a few lines of settings in your application.ini file and voila, magic.
Here’s how to bootstrap your logger and set it to a Zend_Registry key for easy use:
protected function _initRegisterLogger() {
$this->bootstrap('Log');
$logger = $this->getResource('Log');
Zend_Registry::set('Zend_Log', $logger);
}
And here’s a sample application.ini – with omitted portions so you can just see the logging items.
[production]
; the operand param doesn't allow for y > 4 & y < 7 so we need multiple writers.
resources.log.production.writerName = "Stream"
resources.log.production.writerParams.stream = APPLICATION_PATH "/logs/production-critical.log"
resources.log.production.filterName = "Priority"
resources.log.production.filterParams.priority = 3
resources.log.production.filterParams.operand = "<"
resources.log.production1.writerName = "Stream"
resources.log.production1.writerParams.stream = APPLICATION_PATH "/logs/production-errors.log"
resources.log.production1.FilterName = "Priority"
resources.log.production1.filterParams.priority = 4
resources.log.production1.filterParams.operand = "="
resources.log.production2.writerName = "Stream"
resources.log.production2.writerParams.stream = APPLICATION_PATH "/logs/production-warning.log"
resources.log.production2.filterName = "Priority"
resources.log.production2.filterParams.priority = 5
resources.log.production2.filterParams.operand = "="
[testing : production]
resources.log.testing.writerName = "Stream"
resources.log.testing.writerParams.stream = APPLICATION_PATH "/logs/testing-notices.log"
resources.log.testing.filterName = "Priority"
resources.log.testing.filterParams.priority = 5
resources.log.testing.filterParams.operand = "="
resources.log.testing1.writerParams.stream = APPLICATION_PATH "/logs/testing-info.log"
resources.log.testing1.filterName = "Priority"
resources.log.testing1.filterParams.priority = 6
resources.log.testing1.filterParams.operand = "="
[development : testing]
; this logs all messages
resources.log.testing.writerName = "Stream"
resources.log.testing.writerParams.stream = APPLICATION_PATH "/logs/debug.log"
resources.log.testing1.filterName = "Priority"
resources.log.testing1.filterParams.priority = 7
resources.log.testing1.filterParams.operand = "="
; no filter on firebug, logs everything.
resources.log.firebug.writerName = "Firebug"
