Logging & Anonymous Bug Reports

[lukepistrol]

Since CodeEdit now has a pre-release live, it would be helpful to integrate a logging system for logging to the system console and/or a log file on disk that a user can append to a bug report.

In addition we could also integrate anonymous bug reporting which will log crashes and other fatal errors and give maintainers an insight on where issues occur regularly.

Proposal

Two services I have have in mind and have worked on extensively in the past are

• SwiftyBeaver for logging to the console/file/external target
• Sentry for tracking errors.

They work really nicely together and I haven't had any issues at all. Sentry also allows uploading debug symbols to symbolicate stack traces which can also be done automatically on CI using their CLI.

SwiftyBeaver is extensible in a way that you can easily format how a message gets logged, what destination it gets logged to and even add custom destinations like e.g. Sentry.

Your Opinion

The reason for writing this is that I want your opinion on this and to find the best solution possible. I think we should implement such mechanisms to get a hold of bugs that regularly occur and focus our attention on them.

Further I would like to know of any alternative frameworks/solutions we should consider. Please keep in mind that we should honor our user's privacy and that the tools in question need to do so too. Especially important for GDPR compliance, etc…

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Other Frameworks to consider

• Logger: Apple's built in logging framework.
• swift-log: Open source system logging framework from Apple

[Wouter01]

Good ideas! I think using sentry could be really useful for catching crashes.

I'm wondering, what benefits does SwiftyBeaver has compared to Apples Logger + Console.app? I've used those in the past (also for sending bug reports), and at first sight it seems to offer similar functionality compared to SwiftyBeaver (except for colors? But console can filter on categories).

[lukepistrol]

Does Apple's Logger have a way to pass the logs to some kind of handler that then can write it to a specific log file or e.g. send it to sentry?

I also found swift-log (also from Apple) which is a bit more extensible in that way.

Something I really like about SwiftyBeaver though is, that you can completely customize the format of the log string depending on the destination/target. So e.g. You could print out emojis for different log types in the Xcode console, then just send a plain text message to the OS log, and same for external services like Sentry. You can add as many Destinations as you like and it is as simple as subclassing the default destination and setting the format as well as implementing the log function accordingly.

[lukepistrol]

Just to assure: I'm really open to anything. Just want to weigh our options here and what might be the best fit.

[Wouter01]

Does Apple's Logger have a way to pass the logs to some kind of handler that then can write it to a specific log file or e.g. send it to sentry?

I also found swift-log (also from Apple) which is a bit more extensible in that way.

Logs are automatically saved by the system. If we'd want to retrieve those logs, we could use OSLogStore for that. It can retrieve logs of the current process, or of earlier processes (which could be useful after a crash). I've no idea about integration with Sentry, but I'm guessing it must be possible. IIRC, the new logger system (macOS 12.0+) uses both oslog and swiftlog under the hood.

I've used the new logging system for one app, and from my (limited) experience, it seemed to work pretty well. The main advantages of using it would be (in my opinion):

• Use of native library, wouldn't increase app size
• Performance (it seems to be pretty well optimized)
• Good Swift integration (e.g. strings with private/public parts are super easy to make)

I haven't used SwiftyBeaver, so I'm not the person to say which one would be better for our use. I've had a quick look at it, and it has some pretty useful features. I'm definately curious to see what others opinions about this are!

[matthijseikelenboom]

I'm all for this. I've no experience in the use of logging, on Apple platforms and Swift, so I don't have any critique or objections against the current suggested options.

I think it would be a good idea that when an error occurs, and it's sent to Sentry for example, that the users knows that we have received the error. So then they don't have to file an issue about it.

[bombardier200]

Yeah I have not used logging like this on any Apple platforms but I do agree that implementing something like this would help out. Would also let us see errors that maybe isn't causing the app to crash but still an error that needs to be addressed. If these are built into the app, can a user access these logs to dump them to us if say they dont get uploaded for us to view in the cloud?