As one of my rails projects has finally gone to production, one of the more important things I needed consider was how to properly monitor user activity in my application.

Beyond tracking things via google analytics, I wanted to establish some custom log files (beyond spitting everything out into production.log). My first goal: track users that are logging in, and from where.

As I do with most things, I first scour the net for advice so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Sure I could probably figure it out on my own, but given how aggressively “best practices” seem to change with rails, I tend to do a lot of homework before trying something new.

This lead to frustration. I found a lot of material on the standard logging, and even a few posts on using log4, but very little on just using the standard logger to spit out a formatted message to a new file.

Finally I found this helpful post which seems to be about two years old, and a little sparse on details. Frankly, I was a little shocked.. even modern posts on custom logging were referencing this old article.

Anyhow, here was my final solution (which worked better than what was outlined in the article above):

create /config/auditlogger.rb

add this to it:

class AuditLogger < Logger
def format_message(severity, timestamp, progname, msg)
“#{timestamp.to_formatted_s(:db)} #{severity} #{msg}\n”
end
end

edit config/environment.rb

add this near the top: require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), ‘auditlogger’)

add this inside the Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

audit_logfile = File.open(”#{RAILS_ROOT}/log/audit.log”, ‘a’)
audit_logfile.sync = true
AUDIT_LOG = AuditLogger.new(audit_logfile)

(note: you actually need the all caps AUDIT_LOG)

Add this to track a user login inside your login_controller action:

AUDIT_LOG.info(request.remote_ip + ” Logged in: ” + @user.login )

Restart your rails application, watch all the goodies show up in log/audit.log