Meet “The Rat”, my CodeIgniter logger library

Well… it’s been a while since I’ve written on my blog, but at least I came with a new library. This time is about reporting user actions to the developer. So, I named it “Rat” (slang for “A snitch. A person who has tattled on another person”).

Of course this is only a CodeIgniter logger, and not a “person”. You can find the library at the following Github repository: https://github.com/avenirer/CodeIgniter-Rat

This library will allow you to log everything you want to, inside a database or a file.

The installation of the library is quite easy. You simply copy all the files inside the according application directories, and then go to the “application/config/rat.php”. In there you will find out that you can set some configuration:

$config['store_in'] = 'database'; - You can choose to keep the logs inside the database or in a specific directory (relative to the APPPath). If you leave blank (''), it will assume the 'application/logs' directory will be used

$config['session_user_id'] = 'user_id'; - If you want to pass the user's ID automatically to the library when creating the log, you can setup a session value and pass it to this config item. If not, leave blank.

$config['table_name'] = ''; - If you wanted to be original and prefered another table name, you must change it here. Leave blank if the table name is 'rat'

If you decided to use a database for the logs, this is how the sql command should look like (I sure hope you don’t have a table named “rat”…):

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `rat`;
CREATE TABLE `rat` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`user_id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
`date_time` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
`code` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
`message` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

The usage is pretty simple. After you load the library you can write a log by using the log() method:

$this->rat->log('This is a message that will be logged');

Now, if you also want to pass the message a user ID, you can either let the library get the user’s ID from a session variable that can be set inside the configuration file ($config[‘session_user_id’] = ‘user_id’;) or you can pass it as a second parameter to the log() method:

$this->rat->log('This is a message that will be logged', 5);

Also, I thought it to be useful for the library to allow you to set a different message code for your messages, whatever that code is. This way, you can set the error messages a code of “0”, and the success messages a code of “1”, for example. Then, when you output the logs you will know how to apply styling depending on the messages’ codes.

You can pass the code as a third parameter. If you’ve chosen for the library to take the user ID from the session variable, you set the second parameter as “0”.

$this->rat->log('This is the success message',0,1);

To retrieve the logs, you use the get_log() method:

$this->rat->get_log(); //this is if you want the general log
$this->rat->get_log(1); // this is if you want a specific user's log
$this->rat->get_log(1,1); // this is if you want a specific user's log, but only the success messages
$this->rat->get_log(NULL,NULL,'2015-06-29'); // this is if you want the logs from a specific date

If you need more options you can find out about it in readme of the Github Repository.

You can also delete the log by using delete_log() method, which can accept a user ID and/or a date.

I sure hope you will give it a try and tell me what you think about it.

PS: If you need a slimmer (and therefore a faster) library, you can try a helper created by Tim Joosten, User Logger CodeIgniter (https://github.com/Tjoosten/User-logger-codeigniter).