Set Rails Logging on Fire

Rails 2.3+ and Rails 3 rely on Rack, a minimal (and awesome) interface between Ruby and webservers. This has many advantages, one of which is the ability to easily swap Rack applications (middlewares) in & out of your Rails app. Modularity FTW!

One fun (and useful) example of a Rack middleware is a Firebug logger written by Simon Jefford for the CodeRack competition. This middleware allows you to send arbitrary messages directly to Firebug. Why? Since you’re already debugging much of your Rails app in a browser anyway, sending debug output to your browser’s console (instead of tailing a log file) makes a lot of sense.

NOTE: FirebugLogger plays nice with WebKit’s Web Inspector as well.

Simon also released a Rails plugin that you can install to set up the middleware for you, but it’s more fun (and informative) to set it up yourself.

http://fuelyourcoding.com/set-rails-logging-on-fire/