Disable stdout logging for release builds

[ThomasFrans]

• disable the logo on stdout in release builds
• disable the log messages on stdout in release builds

[ThomasFrans]

This may be more of a personal preference. Maybe it's not wanted in which case, please ignore this request 🙂 But it's nice not to have unnecessary output to stdout in release builds (it's a pretty valid point in the Unix philosophy).

The debug build can still have output, but it would be better to put release logs in the log file (which also shouldn't be put in the current working directory, but that's an issue for another time 😄 ).

[Builditluc]

Thank you for your PR!

Yes, you are completely right, it's nice not to have unnecessary output in stdout in release builds but I've noticed that this will remove the logging completely (also the logging into the log file).

Because the logging gets configured within the config, we have two loggers configured within logging.rs. One works without the config loaded, this logs to stdout and the other one uses the config, this logs to the log file. To disable the stdout logging we just have to set the log level in release builds to Off in the logger that logs to stdout. With this, the log file still gets filled (which is useful when a crash occurs).

To change the directory where the log file is saved, we can just give the logger another directory (currently we use the current working directory). So we could modify the config option log_dir to be paths relative to the home directory. This way, something like

log_dir = ".config/wiki-tui/wiki_tui.log"

would save the log file in the same directory as the config file. Would this way of changing the log directory be better?

[Builditluc]

To disable the logging to stdout in the release build we can change the following things in logging.rs:

diff --git a/src/logging.rs b/src/logging.rs
index 491c3ad..67953aa 100644
--- a/src/logging.rs
+++ b/src/logging.rs
@@ -15,9 +15,15 @@ impl Logger {
         let default_config = Config::builder()
             .appender(Appender::builder().build("wiki_tui", Box::new(wiki_tui)))
             .build(
+                #[cfg(debug_assertions)]
                 Root::builder()
                     .appender("wiki_tui")
                     .build(log::LevelFilter::Info),
+
+                #[cfg(not(debug_assertions))]
+                Root::builder()
+                    .appender("wiki_tui")
+                    .build(log::LevelFilter::Off),
             )
             .unwrap();

This will disable only the stdout logger in release builds

[Builditluc]

Here we should remove the "release_max_level_off" feature because this disables logging completely (we need that for crash reports)

[ThomasFrans]

Thank you for your PR!

Yes, you are completely right, it's nice not to have unnecessary output in stdout in release builds but I've noticed that this will remove the logging completely (also the logging into the log file).

Because the logging gets configured within the config, we have two loggers configured within logging.rs. One works without the config loaded, this logs to stdout and the other one uses the config, this logs to the log file. To disable the stdout logging we just have to set the log level in release builds to Off in the logger that logs to stdout. With this, the log file still gets filled (which is useful when a crash occurs).

To change the directory where the log file is saved, we can just give the logger another directory (currently we use the current working directory). So we could modify the config option log_dir to be paths relative to the home directory. This way, something like

log_dir = ".config/wiki-tui/wiki_tui.log"

would save the log file in the same directory as the config file. Would this way of changing the log directory be better?

I'll try to make the changes you suggested here. One detail about the recommendation for the log dir, it should probably go in the cache directory, .config is the XDG_USER_CONFIG directory, used for configuration files only. There are some crates on crates.io that provide the standard directories on different platforms, maybe those could be used? https://crates.io/crates/directories

[Builditluc]

it should probably go in the cache directory, .config is the XDG_USER_CONFIG directory, used for configuration files only. There are some crates on crates.io that provide the standard directories on different platforms, maybe those could be used? crates.io/crates/directories

Yep, that makes sense. We are already using a crate that provides the standard directories on different platforms (dirs) so it wouldn't be much of a hassle to use it to get the cache directory. I will make a PR that moves the log file in a few hours

[Builditluc]

Looks good, thank you! (I will let GitHub finish the running actions, then merge the PR)