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Sébastien Le Gall
Sébastien Le Gall

Posted on • Updated on

Integrating logrus with cobra

You can find a working example on my GitHub: https://github.com/seblegall/blog-scripts/tree/master/logrus-cobra

I recently had to refactor the way one of my app print logs. My idea was to use logrus as it is a very well known lib to produce logs with Go.

Logrus let you print nicely color-coded and structured logs and is completely API compatible with the standard library logger.

logrus

My first question was about log level and how to setup it once across all sub-directory/package of my project.

Under the hood, logrus instantiate a new variable log. Once done, calling the logrus.SetLevel() function will store the level directly in this newly instantiated struct.

Thus, we have a global struct, available across all sub-package making the level automatically shared without having to use dependency injection.

If you need to set a different level in a sub-package (for example), you just need to instantiate a new logger :

var log = logrus.New()

//...

log.Debug("debug log")
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More about logrus here : https://github.com/sirupsen/logrus

Then I thought about adding a flag to my binary, letting the user set its own log level.

My application is using cobra, so I had to decided where to read the flag and where to init the logger by setting the level, depending on the flag value.

My first thought was to create a SetLevel() func which could be called in each cobra sub-command run function. But I found a better approach by looking at the source code of Skaffold

Cobra has a cool feature called pre/post run. It's basically a function that will be executed right before the command start, or right after.

The same way you can defined "persistent" flags in cobra commands (which is a way to create inheritance between commands and sub-commands), the framework also offers a PersistentPreRun function.

That was the perfect place to put my log init as it is :

  • Defined once for all sub-commands (which is a behaviour you probably want when creating a verbose flag.)
  • A place where flags are already defined and read. So I could make a good use of the flag value set by the user.

Here is how it goes :

package cmd

import (
    "io"
    "os"

    "github.com/sirupsen/logrus"
    "github.com/spf13/cobra"
)

//The verbose flag value
var v string

var rootCmd = &cobra.Command{
    Use:   "mycmd",
    Short: "mycmd is a test project to integrate logrus",
}

//NewMyCmd return the root cobra command
func NewMyCmd() *cobra.Command {
    //Here is where we define the PreRun func, using the verbose flag value
    //We use the standard output for logs.
    rootCmd.PersistentPreRunE = func(cmd *cobra.Command, args []string) error {
        if err := setUpLogs(os.Stdout, v); err != nil {
            return err
        }
        return nil
    }

    //Here is where we bind the verbose flag
    //Default value is the warn level
    rootCmd.PersistentFlags().StringVarP(&v, "verbosity", "v", logrus.WarnLevel.String(), "Log level (debug, info, warn, error, fatal, panic")

    return rootCmd
}

//setUpLogs set the log output ans the log level
func setUpLogs(out io.Writer, level string) error {
    logrus.SetOutput(out)
    lvl, err := logrus.ParseLevel(level)
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }
    logrus.SetLevel(lvl)
    return nil
}
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Once the PersistentPreRun func defined, you call easily create a sub-command which will use the logger.

var subCmd = &cobra.Command{
    Use:   "subcmd",
    Short: "subcmd is a subcommand of the main cmd",
    Run: func(cmd *cobra.Command, args []string) {
        runSubCmd()
    },
}

//...
//Inside the NewMyCmd() func
rootCmd.AddCommand(NewSubCmd())
//...

//NewSubCmd return the a sub cobra command
func NewSubCmd() *cobra.Command {
    return subCmd
}

func runSubCmd() {
    logrus.Debug("debug log")
}
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This will produce :

$ go run main.go subcmd -v debug
DEBU[0000] debug log
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By default, logrus is configured on Info level and the default value for my flag is Warn. Son the result proves it works ;-)

You are done !

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