Crate ocli

A simple, opinionated logger for command line tools

ocli aims at a very simple thing: logging for CLI tools done right. It uses the log crate and the ansi_term crate for colors. It provides very few configuration — at this time, just the expected log level.

Features

ocli:

• logs everything to stderr. CLI tools are expected to be usable in a pipe. In that context, the messages addressed to the user must be written on stderr to have a chance to be read by the user, independently of the log level. The program outputs that are meant to be used with a pipe shouldn’t go through the logging system, but instead be printed to stdout, for example with println!.
• shows the Info message as plain uncolored text. Info is expected to be the normal log level to display messages that are not highlighting a problem and that are not too verbose for a standard usage of the tool. Because it is intended for messages that are related to a normal situation, the messages of that level are not prefixed with the log level.
• prefix the messages with their colored log level for any level other than Info. The color depends on the log level, allowing to quickly locate a message at a specific log level
• displays the module path and line when configured at the Trace log level, for all the messages, even if they are not at the Trace log level. The Trace log level is used to help the developer understand where a message comes from, in addition to display a larger amount of messages.
• disable all colorization in case the stderr is not a tty, so the output is not polluted with unreadable characters when stderr is redirected to a file.

Example with Info log level

#[macro_use] extern crate log;

fn main() {
     ocli::init(log::Level::Info).unwrap();

     error!("This is printed to stderr, with the 'error: ' prefix colored in red");
     warn!("This is printed to stderr, with the 'warn: ' prefix colored in yellow");
     info!("This is printed to stderr, without prefix or color");
     debug!("This is not printed");
     trace!("This is not printed");
}

Example with Trace log level

#[macro_use] extern crate log;

fn main() {
     ocli::init(log::Level::Trace).unwrap();

     error!("This is printed to stderr, with the 'path(line): error: ' prefix colored in red");
     warn!("This is printed to stderr, with the 'path(line): warn: ' prefix colored in yellow");
     info!(This is printed to stderr, with the 'path(line): info: ' prefix");
     debug!("This is printed to stderr, with the 'path(line): debug: ' prefix colored in blue");
     trace!(This is printed to stderr, with the 'path(line): trace: ' prefix colored in magenta");
}

Example with log level configured with a command line option

TODO: write a small example that uses clap derive

Structs

• Logger

Constants

• MODULE_LINE_UNKNOWN
• MODULE_PATH_UNKNOWN

Functions

• init
  Initializes the logger.