[Catalyst] Debug Output

[Eden Cardim]

>>>>> "Duncan" == Duncan Garland <Duncan.Garland at motortrak.com> writes:

    Duncan> Hi, I’m trying to get different logging levels in the
    Duncan> development and testing environments. It looks like it
    Duncan> should be quite simple, but I think I’ve missed something
    Duncan> somewhere.

    Duncan> The default configuration of the development server
    Duncan> (script/app_server.pl) sends messages about the actions
    Duncan> which have executed and all levels of log messages to the
    Duncan> standard error. That’s great.

    Duncan> When I deploy it to the test server (Zeus) under fastcgi
    Duncan> (script/app_fastcgi.pl) it sends all this information to the
    Duncan> Zeus logs. That’s not so good, there’s a lot of it.

    Duncan> The base module (lib/app.pm) contains “use Catalyst qw
    Duncan> ~-Debug~”. Get rid of the –Debug. Now it doesn’t send the
    Duncan> list of actions executed to the logs. Good. However it still
    Duncan> logs all levels of messages.

    Duncan> Add __PACKAGE__->log( Catalyst::Log->new( 'warn', 'error' )
    Duncan> ); to app.pm. That sorts out the message levels. Good.

    Duncan> Unfortunately I haven’t got enough information in the
    Duncan> development environment any more.

    Duncan> From the documentation, I just need to set CATALYST_DEBUG=1
    Duncan> or APP_DEBUG=1 (and export them) and the output on the
    Duncan> development environment should return to how it was at the
    Duncan> beginning. Ie All levels of logging plus lots of extra stuff
    Duncan> about actions executed.

The debug flag only enables the debug level and the per-request
information. If you want per-environment settings, I'd recommend you
break your configuration down into separate configuration files for each
environment and use the configuration to set up the log flags.

Something like (untested):

MyApp.pm:

my $env = $ENV{Catalyst::Util::class2env{__PACKAGE__}.'_ENV'} || 'dev';

__PACKAGE__->config(
	'Plugin::ConfigLoader' => {
		file                => __PACKAGE__->path_to('conf'),
		config_local_suffix => $env
	}
);

after setup_plugins => sub {
  my($class, $plugins) = @_;
  my $levels = $class->config->{Log}{level};
  $class->log->enable(@$levels);
};

conf/myapp_dev.conf:

<Log>
  level warn
  level error
</Log>

Then run the app via MYAPP_ENV=test script/etc...

This is going to use your regular myapp.conf file but override it with
the environment-specific configuration which can be committed to your
repository and version-controlled. Note that you can add as many
environments as you wish, as long as you have an equivalent config file
for it. You can also change the environment detection strategy in order
to dodge having to declare the environment at all. I typically go with a
combination of user/host names so that I get configuration files like:

conf/myapp_edenc_home.conf
conf/myapp_edenc_remoteserver1.conf
conf/myapp_someotherdev_remoteserver1.conf
conf/myapp_staging_remoteserver1.conf
conf/myapp_production_remoteserver2.conf
conf/myapp_production_remoteserver3.conf

etc...

This keeps things separate and avoids the typical mine/yours, dev/prod
configuration hell. Of course, this assumes you're running
production/staging apps under those usernames, YMMV.

-- 
   Eden Cardim       Need help with your Catalyst or DBIx::Class project?
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