Category: ActiveRecord | Plasticx Blog

more about logging directly to script/console

Posted by Mike 09/30/2009 at 04:25PM

Logging to the Rails console is an old technique but I’ve noticed many of the examples on the interwebs are broken with the latest 2.3.X series of Rails releases. I believe Jamis Buck’s Watching ActiveRecord Do Its Thing is the popular origin of this technique.

Here is an example that lets you toggle logging on and off in your console. This technique was made popular in Recipe #38 of Advanced Rails Recipes but the original code example is no longer working for me with Rails 2.3.X and MySQL.

Logging in the console

As you can see below, when I start my console and get a count from one of my models only the count is returned. Also, when I perform a GET to the root of the app only the 200 status code is returned. However, when I turn on logging in the console with the loud_logger method I’ve defined both the output of the ActiveRecord log and the ActionController log are printed to the console.

.irbrc and .railsrc

To do the above you’ll have to put the following code in your $HOME/.irbrc and $HOME/.railsrc . I have a .railsrc so that Rails specific code is loaded from there, leaving generic code for all irb sessions in .irbrc . If you were not aware the Rails console is just an extension of the Ruby irb interactive console. By the way, I store my dot files in my $HOME directory using git, the Huba Huba err.the_blog post is a popular origin of this idea.

This code is at the top of my irbrc and it loads the railsrc only if being invoked by the Rails console.

ARGV.concat [ "--readline", "--prompt-mode", "simple" ]
load File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/.railsrc' if $0 == 'irb' && ENV['RAILS_ENV']

This is the code that is an extension of the Advanced Rails Recipes #38. The loud_logger method will put all logging to the console. The default_logger method will put all logging back to the Rails default which is the log/development.log in development mode. The quite_logger will turn off all logging from the console, and to log/development.log. Execute any of these within the console and described behavior takes effect.

def loud_logger
  set_logger_to Logger.new(STDOUT)
end

def quiet_logger
  set_logger_to nil
end

def default_logger
  set_logger_to RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER
end

def set_logger_to(logger)
  def logger.flush; end unless logger.respond_to?(:flush)
  ActiveRecord::Base.logger = logger
  ActionController::Base.logger = logger
  ActiveRecord::Base.clear_all_connections!
end