commonlog

CommonLog

A common Go API for structured and unstructured logging with support for pluggable backends and sinks.

Supported backends (you can log to these APIs):

• simple (built-in textual, colorized backend; see below)
• klog (used by the Kubernetes client library)
• systemd journal
• zerolog
• slog (introduced in Go 1.21)

Supported sinks (you can capture logs from these APIs):

• Go built-in logging
• Go built-in structured logging
• hclog (used by many HashiCorp libraries)

Rationale

The main design goal is to unite your logging APIs and allow you to change its backend at startup. For example, you can choose to log to stderr by default or use journald when running as a systemd service. Sinks allow you to use your selected backend with imported 3rd-party libraries when they use different logging APIs. This design goal is inspired by SLF4J, and we must lament that the Go ecosystem ended up with the same logging challenges that have existed for years in the Java ecosystem.

A secondary design goal is to provide a home for a full-featured unstructured textual logging library, which we call the "simple" backend. It supports rich, customizable formatting, including ANSI coloring when logging to a terminal (even on Windows). So, CommonLog is useful if you're just looking for a straightforward logging solution right now that will not block you from using other backends in the future.

Note that efficiency and performance are not in themselves design goals for CommonLog, and indeed there is always some overhead involved in wrapper and sink implementations. For example, using zerolog directly involves no allocations, but using it via CommonLog will add allocations. To put it simply: if you want zero allocation you must use zerolog directly. Sinks can be especially inefficient because they may have to rely on capturing and parsing of log text. Programming is all about tradeoffs: CommonLog provides compatibility and flexibility at the cost of some efficiency and performance. However, as always, beware of premature optimization. How you are storing or transmitting your log messages is likely the biggest factor in your optimization narrative.

A FAQ is: Why not standardize on the built-in slog API? Slog indeed is a big step forward for Go, not only because it supports structured messages, but also because it decouples the handler, an interface, from the logger. This enables alternative backends, a feature tragically missing from Go's log library. Unfortunately, slog was introduced only in Go 1.21 and is thus not used by much go Go's pre-1.21 ecosystem of 3rd-party libraries. CommonLog supports slog both as a backend and as a sink, so you can easily mix the CommonLog API with slog API and handling.

Features

• Fine-grained control over verbosity via hierarchical log names. For example, "engine.parser.background" inherits from "engine.parser", which in turn inherits from "engine". The empty name is the root of the hierarchy. Each name's default verbosity is that of its parent, which you can then override with commonlog.SetMaxLevel().
• Support for call stack depth. This can be used by a backend (for example, by klog) to find out where in the code the logging happened.
• No need to create logger objects. The "true" API entrypoint is the global function commonlog.NewMessage, which you provide with a name and a level. The default logger type is just a convenient wrapper around it that provides the familiar unstructured functions.
• The unstructured commonlog.Logger type is an interface, allowing you to more easily switch implementations per use without having to introduce a whole backend. For example, you can assign the commonlog.MOCK_LOGGER to disable a logger without changing the rest of your implementation. Compare with Go's built-in Logger type, which frustratingly is a struct rather than an interface.

Basic Usage

The easiest way to plug in a backend is to anonymously import the correct sub-package into your program's main package:

import (
    _ "github.com/tliron/commonlog/simple"
)

This should enable the backend with sensible defaults. Specifically it will log to stderr with verbosity at the "notice" max level.

Example of structured logging:

import (
    "github.com/tliron/commonlog"
    _ "github.com/tliron/commonlog/simple"
    "github.com/tliron/kutil/util"
)

func main() {
    if m := commonlog.NewErrorMessage(0, "engine", "parser"); m != nil {
        m.Set("message", "Hello world!").Set("myfloat", 10.2).Send()
    }
    util.Exit(0)
}

Note that commonlog.NewMessage will return nil if the message cannot be created, for example if the message level is higher than the max level for that name, so you always need to check against nil.

Set can accept any key and value, but two special keys are recognized by the API:

• message: The main description of the message. This is the key used by unstructured logging.
• scope: An optional identifier that can be used to group messages, making them easier to filter (e.g. by grep on text). Backends may handle this specially. Unstructured backends may, for example, add it as a bracketed prefix for messages.

Also note that calling util.Exit(0) to exit your program is not absolutely necessary, however it's good practice because it makes sure to flush buffered log messages for some backends.

Unstructured logging is just a trivial case of structured logging in which only the message key is used. However, CommonLog provides a more familiar logging API:

import (
    "github.com/tliron/commonlog"
    _ "github.com/tliron/commonlog/simple"
    "github.com/tliron/kutil/util"
)

var log = commonlog.GetLogger("engine.parser")

func main() {
    log.Errorf("Hello %s!", "world")
    util.Exit(0)
}

Use conditional logging to optimize for costly unstructured message creation, e.g.:

if log.AllowLevel(commonlog.Debug) {
    log.Debugf("Status is: %s", getStatusFromDatabase())
}

The scope logger can be used to automatically set the "scope" key for another logger. It automatically detects nesting, in which case it appends the new scope separated by a ".", e.g.:

var log = commonlog.GetLogger("engine.parser")
var validationLog = commonlog.NewScopeLogger(log, "validation")
var syntaxLog = commonlog.NewScopeLogger(validationLog, "syntax")

func main() {
    // Name is "engine.parser" and scope is "validation.syntax"
    syntaxLog.Errorf("Hello %s!", "world")
    ...
}

Configuration

All backends can be configured via a common API to support writing to files or stderr. For example, to increase verbosity and write to a file:

func main() {
    path := "myapp.log"
    commonlog.Configure(1, &path) // nil path would write to stdout
    ...
}

Backends may also have their own (non-common) configuration APIs related to their specific features.

You can set the max level (verbosity) using either the global API or a logger. For example, here is a way to make all logging verbose by default, except for one name:

func init() {
    commonlog.SetMaxLevel(commonlog.Debug) // the root
    commonlog.SetMaxLevel(commonlog.Error, "engine", "parser")
}

Descendents of "engine.parser", e.g. "engine.parser.analysis", would inherit the "engine.parser" log levels rather than the root's. Here's the same effect using unstructured loggers:

var rootLog = commonlog.GetLogger("")
var parserLog = commonlog.GetLogger("engine.parser")

func init() {
    rootLog.SetMaxLevel(commonlog.Debug)
    parserLog.SetMaxLevel(commonlog.Error)
}

It's important to note that the configuration APIs are not thread safe. This includes Configure() and SetMaxLevel(). Thus, make sure to get all your configuration done before you start sending log messages. A good place for this is init() or main() functions.

Color

For the simple backend you must explicitly attempt to enable ANSI color if desired. Note that if it's unsupported by the terminal then no ANSI codes will be sent (unless you force it via terminal.EnableColor(true)):

import (
    "github.com/tliron/commonlog"
    _ "github.com/tliron/commonlog/simple"
    "github.com/tliron/kutil/terminal"
    "github.com/tliron/kutil/util"
)

func main() {
    cleanup, err := terminal.EnableColor(false)
    util.FailOnError(err)
    if cleanup != nil {
        util.OnExitError(cleanup)
    }
    commonlog.GetLogger("engine.parser").Error("Hello world!") // errors are in red
    util.Exit(0)
}