Lucee: Creating a log file programmatically

G'day:

This will be super short as there's not much to say, I just want to note the code down for posterity, and to cross-reference elsewhere.

We need to create some log files in our application. I knew in ColdFusion one can just create a file ad-hoc, thus:

writeLog(file="anythingYouLike", text="some log message")

However the Lucee docs for writeLog were claiming that the file option was not implemented, and was also deprecated (this has since been rectified in the docs). It actually is implemented, but I was not so sure about the deprecation status. I asked and got no straight answer really. Anyway, the docs now say it's all good, so that's something.

Whilst this works, the log file is not managed by Lucee: it doesn't show up in Lucee Admin, so one cannot set things like log level / file size / file retention etc. This is fine for some situation, but was not fine for us. We need to be able to control the log level.

I had a sniff around, and found org.lucee.cfml.Administrator, and looking some more, found Configure Lucee within your application. From that, I concocted this proof of concept:

local.admin = new Administrator("web", server.system.environment.ADMINPASSWORD)
admin.updateLogSettings(
    name = "AdamTest",
    level = "ERROR",
    appenderClass = "lucee.commons.io.log.log4j2.appender.ResourceAppender",
    layoutClass = "lucee.commons.io.log.log4j2.layout.ClassicLayout",
    appenderArgs = {
        maxfiles = 20,
        maxfilesize = 1073741824
    }
)
writeLog(log="AdamTest", type="ERROR", text="ERROR SHOULD BE LOGGED")
writeLog(log="AdamTest", type="INFO", text="INFO SHOULD NOT BE LOGGED")

And - hurrah - this does exactly what it looks like it does: all the settings are set correctly and respected. Most importantly for us is that the log level works: in this case logging an ERROR works, but any logs at level INFO are not logged. We have some debugging stuff we want to leave log entries in the codebase, but in general set the log to be ERROR so they don't log until we need to do some debugging.

I had to guess at the appenderArgs key values, but on a whim I assumed they'd be the same as the form fields in Lucee admin, and they kinda were:

<input name="custom_3_appender_maxfiles" type="text" class="large" value="0">
<!-- … -->
<input name="custom_3_appender_maxfilesize" type="text" class="large" value="16">

It also shows up in Admin correctly:

Perfect.

And that's all I have to say on this.

Righto.

--
Adam