Ruby - share logger instance among module/classes

Question

Working on a little Ruby script that goes out to the web and crawls various services. I've got a module with several classes inside:

module Crawler
  class Runner
  class Options
  class Engine
end

I want to share one logger among all those of those classes. Normally I'd just put this in a constant in the module and reference it like so:

Crawler::LOGGER.info("Hello, world")

The problem is that I can't create my logger instance until I know where the output is going. You start the crawler via command line and at that point you can tell it you want to run in development (log output goes to STDOUT) or production (log output goes to a file, crawler.log):

crawler --environment=production

I have a class Options that parses the options passed in through the command line. Only at that point do I know how to instantiate the logger with the correct output location.

So, my question is: how/where to I put my logger object so that all my classes have access to it?

I could pass my logger instance to each new() call for every class instance I create, but I know there has to be a better, Rubyish way to do it. I'm imagining some weird class variable on the module that shared with class << self or some other magic. :)

A little more detail: Runner starts everything by passing the command line options to the Options class and gets back an object with a couple of instance variables:

module Crawler
  class Runner
    def initialize(argv)
      @options = Options.new(argv)
      # feels like logger initialization should go here
      # @options.log_output => STDOUT or string (log file name)
      # @options.log_level => Logger::DEBUG or Logger::INFO
      @engine = Engine.new()
    end
    def run
      @engine.go
    end
  end
end

runner = Runner.new(ARGV)
runner.run

I need the code in Engine to be able to access the logger object (along with a couple more classes that are initialized inside Engine). Help!

All of this could be avoided if you could just dynamically change the output location of an already-instantiated Logger (similar to how you change the log level). I'd instantiate it to STDOUT and then change over to a file if I'm in production. I did see a suggestion somewhere about changing Ruby's $stdout global variable, which would redirect output somewhere other than STDOUT, but this seems pretty hacky.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The may be some weird Ruby magic that could let you avoid it, but there's a fairly simple solution that doesn't need weird. Just put the logger into the module and access it directly, with a mechanism to set it. If you want to be cool about it, define a "lazy logger" that keeps a flag to say if it has a logger yet, and either silently drops messages until the logger is set, throws an exception of something is logged before the logger is set, or adds the log message to a list so it can be logged once the logger is defined.

Answer 2

With the design you've laid out, it looks like the easiest solution is to give Crawler a module method that returns a module ivar.

module Crawler
  def self.logger
    @logger
  end
  def self.logger=(logger)
    @logger = logger
  end
end

Or you could use "class <<self magic" if you wanted:

module Crawler
  class <<self
    attr_accessor :logger
  end
end

It does the exact same thing.

Answer 3

A little chunk of code to demonstrate how this works. I'm simply creating a new basic Object so that I can observe that the object_id remains the same throughout the calls:

module M

  class << self
    attr_accessor :logger
  end

  @logger = nil

  class C
    def initialize
      puts "C.initialize, before setting M.logger: #{M.logger.object_id}"
      M.logger = Object.new
      puts "C.initialize, after setting M.logger: #{M.logger.object_id}"
      @base = D.new
    end
  end

  class D
    def initialize
      puts "D.initialize M.logger: #{M.logger.object_id}"
    end
  end
end

puts "M.logger (before C.new): #{M.logger.object_id}"
engine = M::C.new
puts "M.logger (after C.new): #{M.logger.object_id}"

The output of this code looks like (an object_id of 4 means nil):

M.logger (before C.new): 4
C.initialize, before setting M.logger: 4
C.initialize, after setting M.logger: 59360
D.initialize M.logger: 59360
M.logger (after C.new): 59360

Thanks for the help guys!

Answer 4

How about wrapping the logger in a singleton then you could access it using MyLogger.instance