I wrote about how to deploy a Sinatra application on top of Passenger, with specific instructions for Dreamhost. As it turns out, the logging functionality of Sinatra didn’t work with the instructions, this is the workaround.

The technical details: The trick to this is that Sinatra’s logging uses Rack’s CommonLogger class. If you don’t tell it otherwise, it logs to whatever rack’s env[‘rack.error’] is set to, which is STDERR in this case. Sinatra doesn’t give an easy way to tell it to use a certain logger, but instead, always uses the defaults. The easiest way is to ignore that whole layer off annoyance, and just reopen STDERR and STDOUT to write to the file. That way, no change to Sinatra or your application is needed.

Just add three lines to your config.ru file:

# Add these 3 lines
log = File.new("sinatra.log", "w")
STDOUT.reopen(log)
STDERR.reopen(log)

The config.ru file in it’s entirety:

require 'sinatra/lib/sinatra.rb'
require 'rubygems'
 
Sinatra::Application.default_options.merge!(
  :run => false,
  :env => :production
)
 
# Add these 3 lines
log = File.new("sinatra.log", "w")
STDOUT.reopen(log)
STDERR.reopen(log)
 
require 'test.rb'
run Sinatra.application

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.