Ruby on Rails: Logging server URL requests to a file

Question

So I have a web service and I need to log URL requests to that service to a file. It should be formatted as [resource] [browser], for example like this:

    /photo/23 firefox
    /photo/23 chrome
    /photo/24 chrome
    /user/1 ie9
    /user/2 ie9
    /photo/67 chrome

My web service is written in Ruby on Rails, so I am wondering how to achieve this behaviour. What gem to use, where to put logger logic etc.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:59

You don't need a gem. You can add before_action hook in your application_controller.rb :

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  before_action :log_actions

  def log_actions
    logger.debug "#{request.path} #{request.user_agent}"
  end
end

NOTE 1: logger.debug will log by default in the log/development.log file if you are in development. You can write in any other file if you like.

NOTE 2: request.path gives you the resource path alone (eg. /photo/23). If you also want to include the GET parameters with request.fullpath (eg. /photo/23?page=1)

NOTE 3: request.user_agent gives a full description of the user agent which is long:

eg. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.86

You can make it shorter with regex as described here:

Rails 3: HTTP_USER_AGENT

example:

def shortbrowser(mybrowser)
  case mybrowser 
    when /MSIE/ then "Internet Explorer"
    when /Chrome/ then "Chrome"
    ...
    else mybrowser
  end
end

Then use it:

logger.debug "#{request.path} #{shortbrowser(request.user_agent)}"

Ruby on Rails: Logging server URL requests to a file

1 Answers1