= LittleLogFriend

LittleLogFriend sets your standard logger to a more readable format, like so:

logger = Logger.new STDOUT
logger.info 'hello world'
# => 2009-01-14 10:10:10 [ INFO] 15356 : hello world

The format is: DATE TIME [ LOG LEVEL ] PID : MESSAGE


== Installation
=== The Gem Version

  gem install little_log_friend

Or in your Gemfile:

  gem 'little_log_friend'

You should create an initializer file in order to get LittleLogFriend to work for you, like so:
  # config/initializers/little_log_friend.rb (create it if not present)
  require 'little_log_friend


=== The Plugin Version

  script/plugin install git://github.com/rudionrails/little_log_friend.git

You don't need to specifically require little_log_friend, the init.rb of the plugin will take care of it.

  
== Usage

LittleLogFriend will automatically enhance your standard logger with a nicer 
log formatting - nothing more. Instead of the regular format, you will see 
every log message starting with a nice timestamp and a better formatted message 
altogether. This will help you to trace your logs much easier in case something 
goes happens. Moreover, if you are using monitoring tools to 
detect errors in you logs so that they send out notifications to your sysadmin, 
a unified logging format will significantly ease this process.

Additionally to that, you can add this to your environment.rb: 

LittleLogFriend.colorize!

This will enable colorized log output (under Unix). Every log level will appear
in a different color to ease log interpretation. Here are the colors for each
severity:

debug => green
info  => white
warn  => yello
error => red
fatal => purple
unknown => white
default => default of the console / none


Also, you can override the default color settings, like so: 

LittleLogFriend.colorize!( :info => "\033[01;36m" ) # cyan for Unix

Specify the keys as explained above for the default severity colors.


== Additional Notes

LittleLogFriend is not meant to be a fully featured log solution, but it's
supposed to help in the smaller scale and especially when developing.

Also, you probably don't want to use colorized logging in production mode, as it
will be very difficult to read the log file on a remote server with all the color
information in it.


Copyright (c) 2009 - 2011 Rudolf Schmidt, released under the MIT license