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A minimal logging API for Go

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logr offers an(other) opinion on how Go programs and libraries can do logging without becoming coupled to a particular logging implementation. This is not an implementation of logging - it is an API. In fact it is two APIs with two different sets of users.

The Logger type is intended for application and library authors. It provides a relatively small API which can be used everywhere you want to emit logs. It defers the actual act of writing logs (to files, to stdout, or whatever) to the LogSink interface.

The LogSink interface is intended for logging library implementers. It is a pure interface which can be implemented by logging frameworks to provide the actual logging functionality.

This decoupling allows application and library developers to write code in terms of logr.Logger (which has very low dependency fan-out) while the implementation of logging is managed "up stack" (e.g. in or near main().) Application developers can then switch out implementations as necessary.

Many people assert that libraries should not be logging, and as such efforts like this are pointless. Those people are welcome to convince the authors of the tens-of-thousands of libraries that DO write logs that they are all wrong. In the meantime, logr takes a more practical approach.

Typical usage

Somewhere, early in an application's life, it will make a decision about which logging library (implementation) it actually wants to use. Something like:

    func main() {
        // ... other setup code ...

        // Create the "root" logger.  We have chosen the "logimpl" implementation,
        // which takes some initial parameters and returns a logr.Logger.
        logger := logimpl.New(param1, param2)

        // ... other setup code ...

Most apps will call into other libraries, create structures to govern the flow, etc. The logr.Logger object can be passed to these other libraries, stored in structs, or even used as a package-global variable, if needed. For example:

    app := createTheAppObject(logger)
    app.Run()

Outside of this early setup, no other packages need to know about the choice of implementation. They write logs in terms of the logr.Logger that they received:

    type appObject struct {
        // ... other fields ...
        logger logr.Logger
        // ... other fields ...
    }

    func (app *appObject) Run() {
        app.logger.Info("starting up", "timestamp", time.Now())

        // ... app code ...

Background

If the Go standard library had defined an interface for logging, this project probably would not be needed. Alas, here we are.

When the Go developers started developing such an interface with slog, they adopted some of the logr design but also left out some parts and changed others:

Featurelogrslog
High-level APILogger (passed by value)Logger (passed by pointer)
Low-level APILogSinkHandler
Stack unwindingdone by LogSinkdone by Logger
Skipping helper functionsWithCallDepth, WithCallStackHelpernot supported by Logger
Generating a value for logging on demandMarshalerLogValuer
Log levels>= 0, higher meaning "less important"positive and negative, with 0 for "info" and higher meaning "more important"
Error log entriesalways logged, don't have a verbosity levelnormal log entries with level >= LevelError
Passing logger via contextNewContext, FromContextno API
Adding a name to a loggerWithNameno API
Modify verbosity of log entries in a call chainVno API
Grouping of key/value pairsnot supportedWithGroup, GroupValue
Pass context for extracting additional valuesno APIAPI variants like InfoCtx

The high-level slog API is explicitly meant to be one of many different APIs that can be layered on top of a shared slog.Handler. logr is one such alternative API, with interoperability provided by some conversion functions.

Inspiration

Before you consider this package, please read this blog post by the inimitable Dave Cheney. We really appreciate what he has to say, and it largely aligns with our own experiences.

Differences from Dave's ideas

The main differences are:

  1. Dave basically proposes doing away with the notion of a logging API in favor of fmt.Printf(). We disagree, especially when you consider things like output locations, timestamps, file and line decorations, and structured logging. This package restricts the logging API to just 2 types of logs: info and error.

Info logs are things you want to tell the user which are not errors. Error logs are, well, errors. If your code receives an error from a subordinate function call and is logging that error and not returning it, use error logs.

  1. Verbosity-levels on info logs. This gives developers a chance to indicate arbitrary grades of importance for info logs, without assigning names with semantic meaning such as "warning", "trace", and "debug." Superficially this may feel very similar, but the primary difference is the lack of semantics. Because verbosity is a numerical value, it's safe to assume that an app running with higher verbosity means more (and less important) logs will be generated.

Implementations (non-exhaustive)

There are implementations for the following logging libraries:

slog interoperability

Interoperability goes both ways, using the logr.Logger API with a slog.Handler and using the slog.Logger API with a logr.LogSink. FromSlogHandler and ToSlogHandler convert between a logr.Logger and a slog.Handler. As usual, slog.New can be used to wrap such a slog.Handler in the high-level slog API.

Using a logr.LogSink as backend for slog

Ideally, a logr sink implementation should support both logr and slog by implementing both the normal logr interface(s) and SlogSink. Because of a conflict in the parameters of the common Enabled method, it is not possible to implement both slog.Handler and logr.Sink in the same type.

If both are supported, log calls can go from the high-level APIs to the backend without the need to convert parameters. FromSlogHandler and ToSlogHandler can convert back and forth without adding additional wrappers, with one exception: when Logger.V was used to adjust the verbosity for a slog.Handler, then ToSlogHandler has to use a wrapper which adjusts the verbosity for future log calls.

Such an implementation should also support values that implement specific interfaces from both packages for logging (logr.Marshaler, slog.LogValuer, slog.GroupValue). logr does not convert those.

Not supporting slog has several drawbacks:

These drawbacks are severe enough that applications using a mixture of slog and logr should switch to a different backend.

Using a slog.Handler as backend for logr

Using a plain slog.Handler without support for logr works better than the other direction:

The main drawback is that logr.Marshaler will not be supported. Types should ideally support both logr.Marshaler and slog.Valuer. If compatibility with logr implementations without slog support is not important, then slog.Valuer is sufficient.

Context support for slog

Storing a logger in a context.Context is not supported by slog. NewContextWithSlogLogger and FromContextAsSlogLogger can be used to fill this gap. They store and retrieve a slog.Logger pointer under the same context key that is also used by NewContext and FromContext for logr.Logger value.

When NewContextWithSlogLogger is followed by FromContext, the latter will automatically convert the slog.Logger to a logr.Logger. FromContextAsSlogLogger does the same for the other direction.

With this approach, binaries which use either slog or logr are as efficient as possible with no unnecessary allocations. This is also why the API stores a slog.Logger pointer: when storing a slog.Handler, creating a slog.Logger on retrieval would need to allocate one.

The downside is that switching back and forth needs more allocations. Because logr is the API that is already in use by different packages, in particular Kubernetes, the recommendation is to use the logr.Logger API in code which uses contextual logging.

An alternative to adding values to a logger and storing that logger in the context is to store the values in the context and to configure a logging backend to extract those values when emitting log entries. This only works when log calls are passed the context, which is not supported by the logr API.

With the slog API, it is possible, but not required. https://github.com/veqryn/slog-context is a package for slog which provides additional support code for this approach. It also contains wrappers for the context functions in logr, so developers who prefer to not use the logr APIs directly can use those instead and the resulting code will still be interoperable with logr.

FAQ

Conceptual

Why structured logging?

Why V-levels?

V-levels give operators an easy way to control the chattiness of log operations. V-levels provide a way for a given package to distinguish the relative importance or verbosity of a given log message. Then, if a particular logger or package is logging too many messages, the user of the package can simply change the v-levels for that library.

Why not named levels, like Info/Warning/Error?

Read Dave Cheney's post. Then read Differences from Dave's ideas.

Why not allow format strings, too?

Format strings negate many of the benefits of structured logs:

(Unless you turn positional parameters into key-value pairs with numerical keys, at which point you've gotten key-value logging with meaningless keys.)

Practical

Why key-value pairs, and not a map?

Key-value pairs are much easier to optimize, especially around allocations. Zap (a structured logger that inspired logr's interface) has performance measurements that show this quite nicely.

While the interface ends up being a little less obvious, you get potentially better performance, plus avoid making users type map[string]string{} every time they want to log.

What if my V-levels differ between libraries?

That's fine. Control your V-levels on a per-logger basis, and use the WithName method to pass different loggers to different libraries.

Generally, you should take care to ensure that you have relatively consistent V-levels within a given logger, however, as this makes deciding on what verbosity of logs to request easier.

But I really want to use a format string!

That's not actually a question. Assuming your question is "how do I convert my mental model of logging with format strings to logging with constant messages":

  1. Figure out what the error actually is, as you'd write in a TL;DR style, and use that as a message.

  2. For every place you'd write a format specifier, look to the word before it, and add that as a key value pair.

For instance, consider the following examples (all taken from spots in the Kubernetes codebase):

If you really must use a format string, use it in a key's value, and call fmt.Sprintf yourself. For instance: log.Printf("unable to reflect over type %T") becomes logger.Info("unable to reflect over type", "type", fmt.Sprintf("%T")). In general though, the cases where this is necessary should be few and far between.

How do I choose my V-levels?

This is basically the only hard constraint: increase V-levels to denote more verbose or more debug-y logs.

Otherwise, you can start out with 0 as "you always want to see this", 1 as "common logging that you might possibly want to turn off", and 10 as "I would like to performance-test your log collection stack."

Then gradually choose levels in between as you need them, working your way down from 10 (for debug and trace style logs) and up from 1 (for chattier info-type logs). For reference, slog pre-defines -4 for debug logs (corresponds to 4 in logr), which matches what is recommended for Kubernetes.

How do I choose my keys?

Keys are fairly flexible, and can hold more or less any string value. For best compatibility with implementations and consistency with existing code in other projects, there are a few conventions you should consider.

While key names are mostly unrestricted (and spaces are acceptable), it's generally a good idea to stick to printable ascii characters, or at least match the general character set of your log lines.

Why should keys be constant values?

The point of structured logging is to make later log processing easier. Your keys are, effectively, the schema of each log message. If you use different keys across instances of the same log line, you will make your structured logs much harder to use. Sprintf() is for values, not for keys!

Why is this not a pure interface?

The Logger type is implemented as a struct in order to allow the Go compiler to optimize things like high-V Info logs that are not triggered. Not all of these implementations are implemented yet, but this structure was suggested as a way to ensure they can be implemented. All of the real work is behind the LogSink interface.