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.
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")
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
}
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")
}
This will produce :
$ go run main.go subcmd -v debug
DEBU[0000] debug log
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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