Question

What is the best/easiest way to configure logging for code kept in the lib directory?

Answer 1

There’s two ways to go about it:

• Assuming your library is self-contained and has a module, you can add a logger attribute to your module and use that everywhere in your library code.

  module MyLibrary
    mattr_accessor :logger
  end
  

  You then either use an initializer in config/initializers/, or an config.after_initialize block in config/environment.rb to initialize your logger, like so:

  require 'mylibrary'
  MyLibrary.logger = Rails.logger
  

  This would still allow you to use your self-contained library from scripts outside of Rails. Which is nice, on occasion.

• If using your library without Rails really doesn’t make sense at all, then you can also just use Rails.logger directly.

In either case, you’re dealing with a standard Ruby Logger. Also keep in mind that, in theory, the logger may be nil.