How to Log Requests in Elastica

In the Elastica Release v0.18.4.1, the capability to log requests was added. There is a general Elastica_Log object that can later also be extended to log other things such as responses, exceptions and more. The Elastica_Log constructor takes an Elastica_Client as param. To enable logging, the config variable log for the client has to be set to true, or a specific path the log should be written to. This means that every client instance decides on its own whether logging is enabled or not.

The example below will log the message "hello world" to the general PHP log.

$client = new Elastica_Client(array('log' => true));
$log = new Elastica_Log($client);
$log->log('hello world');

If a file path is set as the log config param, the error log will write the "hello world" message to the /tmp/php.log file.

$client = new Elastica_Client(array('log' => '/tmp/php.log'));
$log = new Elastica_Log($client);
$log->log('hello world');

If logging is enabled, all request are at the moment automatically logged. There is a special conversion of request to log messages. The log message is converted to the shell format, so every log line can directly be pasted into the shell to test out. This is quite nice to debug and to create a gist if others ask what the query looks like. Furthermore, this makes it simpler to figure out whether the problem relates to Elastica or not.

For example the output for updating the number of replicas setting request for the index test would look like below.

curl -XPUT http://localhost:9200/test/_settings -d '{"index":{"number_of_replicas":0}}'