This crate implements a structured logging API similar to the one in Serilog. Web and distributed applications use structured logging to improve machine-readabililty when dealing with large event volumes. Unlike many structured logging APIs, emit's does this without sacrificing human-friendliness.
"Emitted" log events consist of a format and list of named properties, as in the info!() call below.
```rust
extern crate emit;
use std::env; use emit::PipelineBuilder; use emit::collectors::seq;
fn main() { let flush = PipelineBuilder::new() .atlevel(emit::LogLevel::Info) .sendto(seq::SeqCollector::newlocal()) .init();
info!("Hello, {}!", name: env::var("USERNAME").unwrap());
} ```
The event can be rendered into human-friendly text, while the named arguments are also captured as key/value properties when rendered in a structured format like JSON:
json
{
"@t": "2016-03-17T00:17:01Z",
"@mt": "Hello, {name}!",
"name": "nblumhardt",
"target": "web_we_are"
}
This makes log searches in an appropriate back-end collector much simpler:
Collectors render or store events to a wide range of targets. A StdioCollector is included in the emit crate and supports plain text or JSON formatting:
```rust use emit::collectors::stdio::StdioCollector; use formatters::text::PlainTextFormatter;
let flush = PipelineBuilder::new() .writeto(StdioCollector::new(PlainTextFormatter::new())) .init();
eminfo!("Hello, {}!", name: env::var("USERNAME").unwrap()); ```
Produces:
2016-03-24T05:03:36Z INFO Hello, nblumhardt!
All collectors
| Description | Crate | Repository | | ----------- | ----- | ---------- | | ANSI (colored) terminal | emitansiterm | emit-rs/emitansiterm | | Elasticsearch | emitelasticsearch | emit-rs/emitelasticsearch | | Seq | emitseq | emit-rs/emitseq | | STDIO | emit | emit-rs/emit |
What's the status of emit?
The project is undergoing rapid development and thus a fair amount of churn is still anticipated. If you're excited about this style of logging in Rust, we'd love for you to give it a go and share your feedback! Or, join the Gitter channel to keep an eye on progress.
How can I contribute?
Contributions are welcome and appreciated. Check out our issue list to see if anything catches your interest, or raise a ticket to discuss anything else you would like to take on.
What about the log crate?
The log!() macros are the established way to capture diagnostic events in Rust today. However, log destructively renders events into text:
rust
info!("Hello, {}!", env::var("USERNAME").unwrap());
There's no way for a log processing system to later pull the username value from this message, except through handwritten parsers/regular expressions.
The idea of emit is that rendering can happen at any point - but the original values are preserved for easy machine processing as well.
To keep these two worlds in harmony, emit may eventually be able to mirror events to log in future ( #7).