In a project I was working on there were several classes that were involved in a lot of background processing. In order to monitor the behavior of this background processing I wanted a separate log file for these classes. The result: class_logger is a simple plugin that creates a separated log file for an ActiveRecord model.

Installation

./script/plugin install git://github.com/eandrejko/class_logger.git

Usage

In your model use

class Email < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_own_logger
end

which will by default create a log file log/email.log. To write to this log file use:

email = Email.create
email.log("sending")

or use the class method:

Email.class_logger("connecting to server")

Specifying the directory

If you want to keep the log file in another location specify the directory with:

class Email < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_own_logger :in => 'log/emails'
end

which will create the log file in log/emails/email.log.

Potential Applications

There are some advantages to having a separate log file. You can log many more events without cluttering up your production.log. This is potentially helpful for

• troubleshooting background processing in production
• recording and analyzing performance of long running processes in your application