Question

I’m writing a client application which runs on a users computer and sends various requests to a server.

What I’d like to do is make logs from the client programs available on the server so that issues can be easily detected.

So, what I was thinking was to make the client log to a remote location over http.

Is this a good idea and are there any gems or libraries that will facilitate this?

Answer 1

You could use DRb + Logger for this. Both are part of the Ruby standard library, so you don’t even need to install any gems on either machine.

Here’s how it works:

Remote Logging Machine

require 'drb'
require 'logger'

DRb.start_service 'druby://0.0.0.0:9000', Logger.new('foo.log', 'weekly')
DRb.thread.join

Machine Doing the Logging

require 'drb'

$log = DRbObject.new_with_uri 'druby://remote.server.ip:9000'

begin
  $log.info "Hello World"
rescue DRb::DRbConnError => e
  warn "Could not log because: #{e}"
  # Optionally re-log the message somewhere else.
end

puts "Yay, still running!"

I just tested this between two machines 1500 miles apart, where the client machine is even behind NAT, and it worked flawlessly.