dan.thoughts

Most of Ruby web frameworks have terminal logging in development environments. It makes application debugging process much easier than using file logging. Especially for AJAX requests. Of course there is simple solution – use Firebug and javascript console. Unfortunately it is not that convenient.

So, one day i came up with idea to make the same ruby-like style of application logging, even with colorized output.
I decided to use EventMachine library as a server platform. And API is based on JSON packets, via json/pure. Simple, isnt it?

And i called it DebugServer. Pretty understandable

Installation

To install just type

$ sudo gem install debugserver

And for information type:

$ debugserver -i

Usage: debugserver [options]
    -h, --host HOSTNAME              Server hostname
    -p, --port PORT                  Server port
    -i, --info                       Get usage information

By default it will start on localhost:9000.

Usage in PHP

First, download library from GitHub repository: http://github.com/sosedoff/debugclient-php

And then:

// place it into app initialization file
$debug = DebugClient::instance();
$debug->connect();
 
// .... and write it to terminal output
$obj = array(
  'id' => rand(0, 0xFFFF),
  'name' => 'Sample name',
  'time' => strftime('%m-%d-%Y', time())
);
 
// these functions are globally defined
debug_clear(); // clear terminal
debug('This is a plain text message.');
debug_info('This is an informational message.');
debug_warning('This is a warning message.');
debug_error('This is an error message.');
debug_dump($obj);
 
// optional
$debug->close();

Results:

Sources

DebugServer: http://github.com/sosedoff/debugserver
PHP Client: http://github.com/sosedoff/debugclient-php

If you develop some console application you might want your output be more informative, have different colors for operations or logging purposes. It is possible to do with general ANSI escape codes, which are supported by most common console terminals.

The ASCII escape structure is pretty simple. It begins with “ESC” symbol, which is code 27 in ASCII table. Then “[” symbol. Parameters that goes after “[” symbol are separated by “;” and finally ends with closing sequence: “ESC[0m“.

You can extend basic ruby String class with following code:

class String
    # colorize functions
    def red; colorize(self, "\e[1m\e[31m"); end
    def green; colorize(self, "\e[1m\e[32m"); end
    def dark_green; colorize(self, "\e[32m"); end
    def yellow; colorize(self, "\e[1m\e[33m"); end
    def blue; colorize(self, "\e[1m\e[34m"); end
    def dark_blue; colorize(self, "\e[34m"); end
    def pur; colorize(self, "\e[1m\e[35m"); end
    def colorize(text, color_code) "#{color_code}#{text}\e[0m" ; end
end

And sample usage code:

puts "Starting some job...".blue
puts "Processing thing 1 [#{"OK".green}]"
puts "Processing thing 2 [#{"FAIL".red}]"
puts "Oooops! This is a warning!".yellow
puts "Another color!".pur

The output:

Nice and useful.