Best Practice for Integrating log4perl

[jthalhammer]

Dear Monks,

My team is eager to adopt log4perl, but we don't agree on how to integrate it with our system. In your experience, how do most people it? Do they create wrappers, make subclasses, or just use native log4perl interface? What criteria do they use for making that decision? Thanks

[jbrugger]

As noted in the documentation of cpan, you indeed can initialized it in two ways:
Either via Perl commands or via a log4j-style configuration file.

Since this is the easiest way (and i consider it more maintainable / readable), i'd use the log4j style config file:


#log.conf:
log4perl.rootLogger=ERROR, LOGFILE

log4perl.appender.LOGFILE=Log::Log4perl::Appender::File
log4perl.appender.LOGFILE.filename=/var/log/myerrs.log

log4perl.appender.LOGFILE.mode=append
    
log4perl.appender.LOGFILE.layout=PatternLayout
log4perl.appender.LOGFILE.layout.ConversionPattern=[%r] %F %L %c - %m%
+n

# in your perl-script:
use Log::Log4perl;
Log::Log4perl->init("log.conf");

# Anywhere you log:
package blah;
use  Log::Log4perl;

sub new() {
   ...
   $self->{debug} = $debug;
   ...
}

sub method {
    my $self=shift;
    my($param) = @_;

    my $log = Log::Log4perl->get_logger("blah");

    $log->debug("Debug ...") if $self->{debug};
    $log->info("Info ...") if $ $self->{debug};
    $log->error("Error ...") if $self->{debug};


All examples ar shamelesly taken from the Log::Log4perl docs.