Sunday, March 1, 2009

Log4erl v. 0.8.4 is out with SMTP logs

Hi,

Today, version 0.8.4 has been released. The main addition here, as promised, is smtp_appender. As the name imply, this allows for sending log messages to emails.

For this, I've used smtp_client written by Michael Bradford (http://erlang.org/user.html#smtp_client-1.1) with some modifications that allows it to work with Erlang/OTP R12B. I don't think the additions will allow it to work with Erlang/OPT R11B or earlier. If so, you can download and use the original smtp_client from erlang.org instead of the included module in Log4erl distribution.

smtp_client doesn't support SSL authentication, so smtp_appender might not work with gmail or some other email servers that require SSL, but for everything else, this should be enough. Please send me your feedback on this.

Note however that you should use smtp_appender with fatal or warn messages and shouldn't be used with more verbose log levels as the current implementation connects every time to the email server when sending email. I think this should be clear but just wanted everyone to know.

Also, there are 2 other additions, the most important is the feedback when error. For example, if you tried to add an appender with name already registered, you should get an error. Please check README.txt and CHANGELOG.txt for more info.

Log4erl is evolving rapidly in recent days. Next I'm going to add syslog appender and, possibly, html appender. Also, I'll try to add the much needed configuration file for log4erl.

Anyways, we still need to do a lot of work before reaching the 1.0 milestone on July.

Good luck,

Ahmed

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