puts vs logger in rails rake tasks

Question

In a rake task if I use puts command then I see the output on console. However I will not see that message in log file when app is deployed on production.

However if I s

Answer 1

In Rails 2.X to redirect the logger to STDOUT in models:

ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)

To redirect logger in controllers:

ActionController::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)

Answer 2

How about creating an application helper which detects which environment is running and does the right thing?

def output_debug(info)
   if RAILS_ENV == "development"
      puts info
   else
      logger.info info
   end
end

Then call output_debug instead of puts or logger.info

Answer 3

Execute a background job with '&' and open script/console or whatever.. That way you can run multiple commands in the same window.

tail -f log/development.log &
script/console
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.5)
>> Product.all
2011-03-10 11:56:00 18062 DEBUG  Product Load (6.0ms)  SELECT * FROM "products"
[<Product.1>,<Product.2>]

note Can get sloppy quickly when there is a lot of logging output.

Answer 4

Rake tasks are run by a user, on a command-line. Anything they need to know right away ("processed 5 rows") should be output on the terminal with puts.

Anything that needs to be kept for posterity ("sent warning email to jsmith@example.com") should be sent to the Rails.logger.

Answer 5

Put this in application.rb, or in a rake task initialize code

if defined?(Rails) && (Rails.env == 'development')
  Rails.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
end

This is Rails 3 code. Note that this will override logging to development.log. If you want both STDOUT and development.log you'll need a wrapper function.

If you'd like this behaviour only in the Rails console, place the same block of code in your ~/.irbrc.

Answer 6

You could create a new rake task to get this to work.

desc "switch logger to stdout"
task :to_stdout => [:environment] do
 Rails.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
end

This way when you execute your rake task you can add to_stdout first to get stdout log messages or don't include it to have messages sent to the default log file

rake to_stdout some_task