Recent log messages
by Chaz Chumley, Matt Glaman, Richard Jones, Nick Abbott
Drupal 8: Enterprise Web Development
- Drupal 8: Enterprise Web Development
- Table of Contents
- Drupal 8: Enterprise Web Development
- Credits
- Preface
- 1. Module 1
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Installation
- 3. Basic Concepts
- 4. Getting Started with the UI
- 5. Basic Content
- 6. Structure
- 7. Advanced Content
- 8. Configuration
- 9. Users and Access Control
- 10. Optional Features
- 11. Reports
- 12. Extending Drupal
- 13. Theming Drupal
- 14. Getting Support
- 2. Module 2
- 1. Up and Running with Drupal 8
- 2. The Content Authoring Experience
- 3. Displaying Content through Views
- 4. Extending Drupal
- 5. Frontend for the Win
- 6. Creating Forms with the Form API
- 7. Plug and Play with Plugins
- 8. Multilingual and Internationalization
- 9. Configuration Management – Deploying in Drupal 8
- 10. The Entity API
- 11. Off the Drupalicon Island
- 12. Web Services
- 13. The Drupal CLI
- 3. Module 3
- 1. Setting Up Our Development Environment
- 2. Theme Administration
- 3. Dissecting a Theme
- Setting up a local development environment
- Default themes versus custom themes
- Folder structure and naming conventions
- Managing configuration in Drupal 8
- Reviewing the new info.yml file
- The role of templates in Drupal
- Creating our first basic theme
- Introducing Twig
- Template variables
- The role of the theme file in Drupal
- Summary
- 4. Getting Started – Creating Themes
- 5. Prepping Our Project
- 6. Theming Our Homepage
- Creating our HTML wrapper
- Creating our homepage
- Implementing our Header Top region
- Implementing our Header region
- Adding a logo
- Enabling Site branding
- Printing our Header region
- Creating Block templates
- Implementing our search form block
- Placing our search form block
- Creating a search form block template
- Adding custom JavaScript
- Creating an input element template
- Working with menus
- Creating a menu template
- Creating System Menu block template
- Creating a sticky header
- Implementing our Headline Region
- Implementing our Before Content region
- Implementing the footer
- Summary
- 7. Theming Our Interior Page
- 8. Theming Our Blog Listing Page
- Reviewing the Blog Listing mockup
- Creating our blog listing
- Creating a Post Listing view
- Managing our Post Listing block
- Implementing our Node template
- Adding CSS classes to Twig
- Working with content variables
- Using the without filter
- Creating our post image slider
- Working with field templates
- Adding the Owl Carousel library
- Using Twig filters for dates
- Printing title and teaser
- Creating our post metadata
- Field templates and taxonomy
- Handling comments in Drupal 8
- Creating a theme file
- Creating a Categories block
- Managing our Categories block
- Implementing responsive sidebars
- Theming a Block template
- Drupal Views and Twig templates
- Managing popular versus recent content
- Adding the About Us block
- Summary
- 9. Theming Our Blog Detail Page
- Reviewing the Blog detail mockup
- Previewing our Blog detail page
- Creating a Post Full template
- Working with comments
- Implementing social sharing capabilities
- Summary
- 10. Theming Our Contact Page
- 11. Theming Our Search Results
- 12. Tips, Tricks, and Where to Go from Here
- A. Biblography
- Index
The Recent log messages report is probably the most commonly used of the reports available in Drupal core. Any module is able to report its activity here in a standardized way, whether it is for error reporting or simply informational details.
Click on the Recent log messages link, and you'll see a report similar to this:
Due to the fact that any module can insert messages here, the display can be a little confusing. Each log entry has the following fields:
- Type: This is defined by the module that recorded the log entry and is most often the module name.
- Date: The date and precise time (not shown in the preceding screenshot to save space) of the recorded log entry.
- Message: This field displays more detailed information associated with the log entry. This can be a truncated summary, and if you click on the message, you can often get more information.
- User: If the message was generated from a logged in session, in which the user was logged in, this will show the user's name. If there was no user logged in, this will say anonymous.
- Operations: Some log messages may provide additional actions that can be carried out as a consequence of the message—this is determined by the modules, but can include, for example, a link to a settings page to fix a reported error.
Sometimes, there is more detail to a log entry than the summary report is able to display. Clicking on the message opens up another page with more log details:
This provides the following additional information that was not on the summary page:
- Location: The URL being loaded when the log was generated
- Referrer: The URL immediately preceding the location URL
- Message: This may be a more detailed message than was presented on the summary screen
- Severity: The predefined severity levels are in descending order of urgency—Emergency, Alert, Critical, Error, Warning, Notice, Info, and Debug
- Hostname: The IP address or domain name of the user originating the request
When you have a number of modules operating on your Drupal site, it can be difficult to find the messages in the report that you are looking for. On the reports page, there is a filter system to help with this:
- Go back to the Recent log messages page.
- Expand the FILTER LOG MESSAGES section:
This will allow you to only show messages for a specific type (for example, just for one module) and specific severity. This is a quick way to reduce the number of entries, so you are only presented with what you are looking for.
For example, to check for login attempts, select user from the Type menu, Notice from the Severity list then click the Filter button:
The resultant filtered report may be as follows:
This will show you only the log records of interest. Click on the Reset button at any time to clear the filter and display the full list.
Each log message is stored in the Drupal database, up to a limit defined in the site configuration. It is unwise to store all messages forever, due to the potential amount of data and therefore database size. 1000 messages is a sensible default.
To clear the current list, go back to the main reports screen by navigating to Manage | Reports | Recent log messages.
Expand the CLEAR LOG MESSAGES section:
This has one simple function—Clear log messages—which will permanently delete all log messages from the database. By default, the maximum number of messages is set to 1,000; to change the setting go to:
Manage | Configuration | Development | Logging and errors:
Recording so much data to your database can have an impact on the performance of your site as it gets busier. For this reason, there is an alternative module in Drupal 8 core called Syslog. Once enabled, Syslog will record exactly the same information that we have been looking at so far into the server log files rather than the Drupal database. This is a significantly faster process, if slightly less convenient for you to access as the site administrator.
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