CakePHP Monolog Plugin

Despite the very advanced logging system offered in CakePHP, I still would have had to write a lot more code to be able to handle logs the way I needed. To write the least code possible, I chose to go with the popular monolog library.

Install

Because monolog is a composer package and to avoid having to manually write a lot of includes (vs. auto-loading), I decided to release this also as a composer package and take advantage of the auto-loading magic.

First, add this plugin as a requirement to your composer.json:

{
	"require": {
		"cakephp/monolog": "*"
	}
}

And then update:

php composer.phar update

That's it! You should now be ready to start configuring your channels.

Configuration

Start by creating a logging configuration file (i.e. app/Config/log.php) that you will include early in your app/Config/bootstrap.php:

include 'log.php';

A basic configuration, to replicate what Cake does but using Monolog (to give you a good starting example), would look something like this:

CakePlugin::load('Monolog');

CakeLog::config('debug', array(
	'engine' => 'Monolog.MonologLogger',
	'channel' => 'app',
	'handlers' => array(
		'Stream' => array(
			LOGS . 'debug.log',
			'formatters' => array(
				'Line' => array("%datetime% %channel% %level_name%: %message%\n")
			)
		)
	)
));

Simple, no? But let's really do some serious logging, otherwise why bother moving away from the default CakePHP logging system?

The example below shows how to setup:

• rotating logs that are kept from 30 days and readable by logstash with memory peak usage info
• normal log file with much more details about the request
• email notifications for critical and alert levels including only the error message

CakeLog::config('logstash', array(
	'engine' => 'Monolog.MonologLogger',
	'channel' => 'app',
	'handlers' => array(
		'RotatingFile' => array(
			LOGS . 'logstash.log',
			30,
			'formatters' => array(
				'Logstash' => array('web', env('SERVER_ADDR'))
			),
			'processors' => array('MemoryPeakUsage')
		),
		'Stream' => array(
			LOGS . 'logstash.log',
			'formatters' => array(
				'Line' => array("%datetime% %channel% %level_name%: %message% %context% %extra%\n")
			),
			'processors' => array('MemoryUsage', 'Web')
		),
		'CakeEmail' => array(
			'[email protected]',
			'ALERT: APPLICATION REQUIRES IMMEDIATE ATTENTION.',
			'default'
		)
	)
));

The CakeEmailHandler was just submitted to the main monolog repo today. If it is not merged by the time you are reading this, just use my fork.