Opinionated zerolog configuration

A Go package providing opinionated zerolog configuration and a pretty-printer tool for its logs, prettylog.

Features:

• Logging to both the console (with or without colors) and appending to a file at the same time. Each with its own logging level.
• JSON timestamps are in millisecond RFC format in UTC, e.g., 2006-01-02T15:04:05.000Z07:00.
• JSON does not escape HTML. #568
• Error's are converted to JSON using gitlab.com/tozd/go/errors's Formatter into an object with error's message, a stack trace, optional details and recursively with joined and cause errors.
• Error's optional details and a stack trace are shown when logging to the console.
• Integrates well with github.com/alecthomas/kong CLI argument parsing.
• Both Go's global log and zerolog's global log are redirected to the configured zerolog logger.
• Supports adding logger to the context which can buffer log entries (usually debug entries) until a log entry with a triggering level happens (usually an error), if ever.
• Provides a pretty-printer tool, prettylog, matching the configured zerolog's console output.

Installation

This is a Go package. You can add it to your project using go get:

go get gitlab.com/tozd/go/zerolog

It requires Go 1.23 or newer.

Releases page contains a list of stable versions of the prettylog tool. Each includes:

• Statically compiled binaries.
• Docker images.

You should just download/use the latest one.

The tool is implemented in Go. You can also use go install to install the latest stable (released) version:

go install gitlab.com/tozd/go/zerolog/cmd/go/prettylog@latest

To install the latest development version (main branch):

go install gitlab.com/tozd/go/zerolog/cmd/go/prettylog@main

Usage

As a package

The package can be used with github.com/alecthomas/kong CLI argument parsing. In that case Kong populates the logging configuration which you then pass to zerolog.New which then configures zerolog and sets Logger and WithContext fields:

int main() {
  var config zerolog.LoggingConfig
  parser := kong.Must(&config,
    kong.UsageOnError(),
    kong.Writers(
      os.Stderr,
      os.Stderr,
    ),
    kong.Vars{
      "defaultLoggingConsoleType":             DefaultConsoleType,
      "defaultLoggingConsoleLevel":            DefaultConsoleLevel,
      "defaultLoggingFileLevel":               DefaultFileLevel,
      "defaultLoggingMainLevel":               DefaultMainLevel,
      "defaultLoggingContextLevel":            DefaultContextLevel,
      "defaultLoggingContextConditionalLevel": DefaultContextConditionalLevel,
      "defaultLoggingContextTriggerLevel":     DefaultContextTriggerLevel,
    },
    zerolog.KongLevelTypeMapper,
  )
  ctx, err := parser.Parse(os.Args[1:])
  parser.FatalIfErrorf(err)
  logFile, errE := zerolog.New(&config)
  defer logFile.Close()
  parser.FatalIfErrorf(errE)
  config.Logger.Info().Msgf("%s running", ctx.Model.Name)
}

Of course, you can construct the configuration struct yourself, too. zerolog.LoggingConfig struct can also be embedded inside another struct if you need additional CLI arguments.

The main logger is available as config.Logger. You have to close returned logFile once you stop using the logger (e.g., at the end of the program).

There is also config.WithContext which allows you to add a logger to the context. Added logger buffers log entries (usually debug entries) until a log entry with a triggering level happens (usually an error), if ever. This allows you to log at a lower level (e.g., debug) but output all those log entries only if an error happens. Those logged debug entries can then help debug the error. If you want to disable this behavior, make trigger level be the same as conditional level.

zerolog.WithContext returns a new context, and two functions, close and trigger. You have to call close when you are done with the context to free up resources. And you can call trigger if you want to force writing out any buffered log entries (e.g., on panic).

See full package documentation with examples on pkg.go.dev.

prettylog tool

zerolog can output logs as JSON. If your program happens to have such output, or if you stored those logs somewhere and would like to format them in the same way zerolog's console output looks like, you can use prettylog tool:

./program | prettylog

cat program.log | prettylog

If you have Go available, you can run it without installation:

cat program.log | go run gitlab.com/tozd/go/zerolog/cmd/go/prettylog@latest

Or with Docker:

cat program.log | docker run -i registry.gitlab.com/tozd/go/zerolog/branch/main:latest

The above command runs the latest development version (main branch). See releases page for a Docker image for the latest stable version.

GitHub mirror

There is also a read-only GitHub mirror available, if you need to fork the project there.