Hi there,

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Eric Moore wrote:

>  I saw a note about redirecting STDERR to the screen but nothing about
>  sending it to the virtual_host.error_log.

Do you really want to do that?  Some errors may have nothing to do
with a virtual host (no permission, no more filehandles, disc full...)
and are more appropriate to the main server error_log.

I normally log everything to STDERR, but in the log output I like to
put enough information to tell me what the report was about. :)  That
could include for example something which identifies the virtual host,
if a virtual host was involved.  I might say:

print STDERR "$date_time $script $line $vhost $problem $other_useful_stuff\n"

and then split the log later if necessary with something like grep.

Actually on a larger project I might have a script especially for
logging errors which is called by the other scripts, passing any
parameters as necessary.  The log script would insert stuff which
it can deduce itself (like the date and time) without the need for
variables to be passed.  This kind of serious attention to logging
is probably overkill in the early stages of testing your ideas.

I tend to err on the side of verbosity in logs, then cut it down as
I get more confident. I have a conditional around the log statements
so that I can alter a variable somewhere to change the verbosity of
the logging.  Sometimes I'll comment out a log statement but rarely
will I delete, even if things have been running fine for years.

You might want to play with logging through the request or server
objects, using the $r-> warn() or $r->server->warn() methods.  See
chapter 9 of the Eagle Book, "Logging Methods" and chapter 16 of the
mod_perl Cookbook.  Details on the mod_perl website.

There are several logging modules on CPAN and you can use Apache's
flexible logging facilites too, for example you can log to a pipe and
do whatever you want on the fly.  Be careful with logging, performance
and security may be involved.  It's all in the docs.  Lots of docs. :)

73,
Ged.