Managing the logs

---

Issues: fabmob/e-mission-phone-fabmob#20, fabmob/e-mission-phone-fabmob#19

Actual configuration

Currently, logs are rotating daily at midnight using a TimedRotatingFileHandler. Each day, at 7 o'clock, the server is executing a script which will merge the log files of the pipeline into a single file. Moreover, if there are errors, the server will also notify the administrator by sending them a push notification thanks to notify.run. This script is currently only available locally on the server and can be found at /var/emission/em-scripts/merge_intake_logs.py.

Logs architecture

All the e-mission logs can be found into the folder /var/log/emission. It is possible to change that folder by editing some configuration files (see Changing log configuration). The current architecture is the following:

 var/log/emission/
            |__ pipeline/       # Contains all the logs linked to the pipeline
            |__ webserver/      # Contains all webserver logs
            |__ log_merger.log  # Contains information logged by the merge script

Changing log configuration

Each logs configuration files can be found in the folder e-mission-server/conf/log. In those files, it is possible to change the logging handlers but also the formatter. The log configuration file of the pipeline is intake.conf ; as for the webserver, it is webserver.conf. To have daily rotating logs, those files will be configured as below:

{
    "handlers": {
        "errors": {
            "backupCount": 90,
            "when":"midnight",
            "level": "ERROR",
            "formatter": "detailed",
            "class": "logging.handlers.TimedRotatingFileHandler",
            "filename": "/var/log/emission/pipeline/intake-errors.log"
        },
        "console": {
            "class": "logging.StreamHandler",
            "level": "WARNING"
        },
        "file": {
            "backupCount": 90,
            "filename": "/var/log/emission/pipeline/intake.log",
            "when":"midnight",
            "formatter": "detailed",
            "class": "logging.handlers.TimedRotatingFileHandler"
        }
    },
    "version": 1,
    "root": {
        "handlers": [
            "console",
            "file",
            "errors"
        ],
        "level": "DEBUG"
    },
    "formatters": {
        "detailed": {
            "class": "logging.Formatter",
            "format": "%(asctime)s:%(levelname)s:%(thread)d:%(message)s"
        }
    }
}

Notifying the administrator

Current channel: https://notify.run/gp4ekyBL51VAoNdi

To notify the administrator, we are currently using notify.run public servers.

Note

It is possible to self-host a notify.run server, but, as we are not sending any confidential data, it is not necessary.

To use notify.run in a Python script, we can install it with pip.

$ pip install notify-run

After installing it, we have to configure it. To add a previously created channel, we will use configure.

$ notify-run configure <url without the /c/>

Or, we can register a new channel with register.

$ notify-run register

Tip

We can retrieve the currently configured channel into ~/.config/notify-run.

Once configured, we can now add the following lines into our Python script:

from notify_run import Notify
notify = Notify()
notify.send('Error(s) in the pipeline, you should check intake_global-errors.log')

The administrator will just have to scan the QR code contained in the channel webpage and "Subscribe on this device" to receive a push notification on your phone.