Logging can be very useful for finding problems in a running application. It can be also very useful for people who are not familiar with an application or a module who want to learn how the code works maybe in order to fix a bug or add a feature. Log::Log4perl is a complex module for logging with lots of knobs to fiddle with, but there is an easy way to get started using it.

Log in a script

In the most simple case we use it to add logging messages to a script. We need to load the module importing the :easy key that will import 6 functions for the 6 logging levels provided by Log::Log4perl and 6 variables with corresponding names.

use strict; use warnings; use 5.010; use Log::Log4perl qw(:easy); Log::Log4perl->easy_init($WARN); FATAL "This is", " fatal"; ERROR "This is error"; WARN "This is warn"; INFO "This is info"; DEBUG "This is debug"; TRACE "This is trace";

Running this script will print out:

2014/08/24 09:59:37 This is fatal 2014/08/24 09:59:37 This is error 2014/08/24 09:59:37 This is warn

In the code we can use any of the 6 methods to send logging messages. These logging functions will accept any number of parameters and will concatenate them as can be seen in the case of the FATAL call.

Once such calls were added to the script we can use the easy_init method to set the minimal level to be actually logged. Because in the above example we set the minimal log-level to be WARN, only the message that have higher priority (FATAL, ERROR and WARN) will be actually printed.

By default Log::Log4perl will print to the STDERR (Standard error) channel which is by default connected to the screen.

If we set the log level to FATAL by writing

Log::Log4perl->easy_init($FATAL);

then the above code will only print only one line.

Turn off logging

If we don't call the easy_init method at all, nothing will be printed. Alternatively, a probably better approach is to explicitly turn it off using

Log::Log4perl->easy_init($OFF);

Using methods

Using these functions might be easy, but as the application growth, you might be better of with a more object oriented approach. In order to use the OOP way, one can fetch the internal logger object using the get_logger and then call the appropriate method names (the lower case version of the levels).

use strict; use warnings; use 5.010; use Log::Log4perl qw(:easy); Log::Log4perl->easy_init($WARN); my $logger = Log::Log4perl->get_logger(); $logger->fatal( "This is", " fatal"); $logger->error( "This is error"); $logger->warn( "This is warn"); $logger->info( "This is info"); $logger->debug( "This is debug"); $logger->trace( "This is trace");

This still requires importing the :easy tag in order to have the variables $FATAL, $ERROR, $WARN to set the minimal level. In order to avoid importing even those variables we can use the to_priority function of Log::Log4perl::Level. Normally the variables such as $WARN contain a numerical value, but the to_priority function can convert the string representation of the level-name into that numerical value:

use Log::Log4perl (); use Log::Log4perl::Level (); Log::Log4perl->easy_init( Log::Log4perl::Level::to_priority( 'WARN' ) );

Full example

use strict; use warnings; use 5.010; use Log::Log4perl (); use Log::Log4perl::Level (); Log::Log4perl->easy_init(Log::Log4perl::Level::to_priority( 'WARN' )); my $logger = Log::Log4perl->get_logger(); $logger->fatal( "This is", " fatal"); $logger->error( "This is error"); $logger->warn( "This is warn"); $logger->info( "This is info"); $logger->debug( "This is debug"); $logger->trace( "This is trace");