[Typo3-dev] Logging in TYPO3

[Michael Scharkow]

Kasper Skårhøj wrote:
> [Sorry AGAIN, I'm really trigger happy this morning it seems: previous mail was sent unfinished once more!!!]

FIY, you can cancel postings if you use the newsgroups, not sure whether 
this stops mailman from sending stuff out.

> Hi Folks,
> 
> I just want to poll some opinions about loggin needs in TYPO3. We have these log types:
> 
> - Backend log which tracks user logins and changes to records. I intend to open this up for logging from extensions too (3.9.0 probably)

Good idea, should not be too difficult to implement if the extensions 
use standard $TCA and stuff, should it?

> - Frontend log: we have no real log for frontend plugins which could be useful for tracing errors in TypoScript or plugins - but I can't come up with a powerful idea for this which could be really useful (and it most likely shouldn't go into the backend log!)

Don't we have such things in the Admin Panel, or through the debug() 
statements?

> - t3lib_div::devLog() which was introduced during the development of "realurl" extension, but I personally didn't use it since (rather like debugging with debug() function....). The description of this function is seen below [1]. Output from that log is handled by extension, an example is "logit".

I don't remember exactly what pros and cons there were to this, gotta 
read the thread from January again.

> The motivation for writing is: 
> - For 3.9.0 I plan to work on the backend syslog
> - ... and it has just been suggested to me to implement he feature for unix systems that we can call the system logger to put TYPO3 messages into eg. "/var/log/syslog" - whichi of course begs the question; What messages from where makes sense...

I think a plain text log file is a very good idea, since there are 
standard tools for analysis and the handling is much easier. I am not so 
sure about using syslog syscalls on Unix because a) it's probably 
slow(er), b) it's not portable and c) where would TYPO3 logs fit in the 
standard categories: mail, info, kernel, messages?

Let's just log to a file with a standard format, just like samba, 
apache, younameit do it.

Greetings,
Michael