Feature request: syslog appender

[danielsz]

Hi Peter,

I note that syslog support was never mentioned before.

Hipsters may cling on to logging frameworks and façades like they would to skinny jeans, but there is a venerable protocol on UNIX systems called Syslog that is a trusted option when deploying daemons on production servers. Call me old-fashioned.

There is an existing implementation in Clojure.

More rationale (excerpt from LinuxJournal):

As the number and complexity of applications on a system grows, so, too, does the complexity of the system administrator's job. Applications and their messages vary widely in their significance to certain audiences. If a number of applications are considered “critical” and their status is the system administrator's responsibility, he does not want to search to find out where and how every critical application logs its status. That's where syslogd comes in.

[ptaoussanis]

Hey Daniel! Sure, would be happy to take a PR that adds a Syslog appender :-)

[danielsz]

Cool! I've added this to my todo list.

[ptaoussanis]

Great, just ping me if you have any questions along the way. Cheers!

[nicferrier]

Any progress on this @danielsz ?

[danielsz]

@nicferrier Ah, no, never got to it, sorry. :(

[danielflower]

+1 for syslog support, unless there is another way to get Papertrail to listen to a Heroku app.

edit: nevermind, using the default config started working. I hereby rescind my +1.

[lbradstreet]

@danielflower what do you mean by "using the default config"? I also want to log to syslog from timbre.

[danielflower]

I think I meant just logging to the console. I never got it to log to syslog sorry.

[ptaoussanis]

Just throwing out there that writing a Timbre appender for https://github.com/joshrotenberg/brolog looks like it should be quite straight forward + potentially a good exercise for folks wanting to get more familiar with how Timbre appenders work.

There's an example appender that you can use as a starting point at https://github.com/ptaoussanis/timbre/blob/master/src/taoensso/timbre/appenders/example.clj

An appender's basically just a map with some config keys and a (fn [data-map]) -> ?output, both of which are described at https://github.com/ptaoussanis/timbre/blob/93044a4201ebcae5fc2c34c07ee19d007b73f671/src/taoensso/timbre.cljx#L61

PR welcome if anyone feels like taking a stab at this.

[seankibler]

I'm going to take a shot at this. I'll be using timbre and I'd like to contribute. My time is extremely limited but if I can just leverage the aforementioned brolog library implementation seems as it will be very easy.

[jszakmeister]

Not that the syslog API is changing much, but how do you feel about using a library that hasn't been touched in several years? I'm assuming that's okay?