Serif

An opinionated Rust tracing-subscriber configuration with a focus on readability.

About

Serif is my take on the best way to configure tracing-subscriber for use in command-line applications, with an emphasis on readability of the main log messages. The tracing span scope, event target, and additional metadata is all rendered with dimmed colors, making the main message stand out quickly. Or at least it does on the Solarized Dark colorscheme that I prefer.

Serif uses EnvFilter for filtering using the RUST_LOG environment variable, with a default level of INFO if not otherwise configured.

Serif sets up FmtSubscriber and EnvFilter in a unified configuration. Basically this is all to make my life easier migrating from env_logger.

Usage

All you need is a single dependency in Cargo.toml and a single builder chain to set up the global default tracing subscriber. For convenience, serif re-exports tracing and provides the common log macros in serif::macros.

use serif::macros::*;
use serif::tracing::Level;

fn main() {
    serif::Config::new()            // create config builder
        .with_default(Level::DEBUG) // the default otherwise is INFO
        .init();                    // finalize and register with tracing
    info!("Hello World!");
    do_stuff();
    debug!("Finished doing stuff");
}

For more advanced use-cases, Serif provides EventFormatter which implements FormatEvent, and FieldFormatter which implements FormatFields. These objects can be passed to a SubscriberBuilder along with whatever other options are desired.

ANSI Terminal Colors

By default, Serif enables ANSI coloring when the output file descriptor (stdout or stderr) is a TTY and the environment variable NO_COLOR is either unset or empty. At the moment, the specific color styles are not customizable.

A note to advanced users configuring a SubscriberBuilder manually: EventFormatter and FieldFormatter do not track whether ANSI colors are enabled directly, instead they obtain this from the Writer that's passed to various methods. Call SubscriberBuilder::with_ansi to configure coloring in custom usage.

License

Serif is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Additionally, heavy inspiration has been taken from the implementation of tracing-subscriber, which is released under the MIT license.