Structured logging on localhost

One thing I miss from developing native apps with Swift is the structured logging in the Console app.

I loathe scanning text logs and find Elixir’s output hard to scan. It’s often just a wall of text. Like in this screenshot:

Is there a solution for sending the logs to either the Console app or a custom-made UI? A solution where maps are rendered as nicely as with GitHub - software-mansion/live-debugger: Tool for debugging LiveView applications. maybe?

The primitives are there, but I’m not aware of ready made solutions.

:logger supports structured logs and you can have handlers sending logs wherever you need.

Though you still also need producers of logs to produce structured logs. If logs come from libraries that’s not just a change to your code.

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Yeah, I’ve seen Logger supports structured logging.

I can live with that. If at least my own loggins are structured I am happy.

Ok, if no solution is there, maybe I should build it myself …

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A solution for this would be great. I’ve had problems countless times with such long error messages, sometimes it would get so bad, that I would have to copy paste into a text editor and split it on my own to make any sense of it.

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Just to add. It’s not like there’s no solutions at all out there, but usually they’re coupled to some logger aggregator system, which one might or might not use and usage is generally less likely in development over in production.

I was curious however. Apple seems to have a C api for its unified logger system, so a NIF or port could call into that.

I’m amazed nobody has mentioned Syslog (RFC5425) yet. It’s old, well known, and allows structured and unstructured logging at the same time. Couple it with Promtail/Vector for forwarding logs to Loki and you have a production setup at home.

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Maybe something like old project of mine GitHub - hauleth/lumberjack: Web based log viewer for Erlang and Elixir applications. It may not be actively maintained at the time of writing, but it is functional and more or less complete wrt. Elixir/Erlang logs.

Alternatively you can pipe your logs to something like Lnav to view them locally.

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I couldn’t make it work unfortunately. A mismatch between the versions of file_system phoenix_live_reload and lumberjack needs.

Not an answer regarding structured logging but:
You might also have a look at

Needs a postgres DB though, but it mitigates the pain looking at these ‘extended’ error messages like the one you were showing to us.

I will check and update as needed. It shouldn’t be hard.

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Interesting. I’ll take a look at it!

This is great! Thanks for the tip!

Fixed that issue. I will try to revive it a little bit and remove dependencies on stuff like Cowboy, but that particular issue is fixed now.

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