A thing in all my projects is using Elastic cloud for my application logging.

The reason for this is that, it’s super easy to start logging in Elastic with Laravel. With ~20$ a month you can have a small Elasticsearch & Kibana setup ready the receive logs from your application.

Now let me show you how to do this.

First you need to require the official Elasticsearch library

$ composer require elasticsearch/elasticsearch

Next we add an elastic custom logging driver to config/logging.php file

'elastic' => [
            'driver' => 'custom',
            'via'    => \App\Logging\ElasticLogger::class,
            'cloud_id' => env('ELASTIC_CLOUD_ID', null),
            'password' => env('ELASTIC_PASSWORD', null),            
            'prefix' => env('ELASTIC_INDEX_PREFIX', \Illuminate\Support\Str::slug(env('APP_NAME', 'laravel'), '_')),
        ],

and we create our custom ElasticLogger class in app/Logging/ElasticLogger.php with the following

<?php

namespace App\Logging;

use Carbon\Carbon;
use Monolog\Formatter\ElasticsearchFormatter;
use Monolog\Handler\ElasticsearchHandler;
use Psr\Log\LoggerInterface;
use Elasticsearch\ClientBuilder;
use Illuminate\Log\Logger;
use Monolog\Logger as MonologLogger;

class ElasticLogger
{
    public function __invoke(array $config): LoggerInterface
    {
        $index =  $config['prefix'] . '_' . Carbon::now()->format('Y_m_d');

        $client = ClientBuilder::create()
            ->setElasticCloudId($config['cloud_id'])
            ->setBasicAuthentication('elastic', $config['password'])
            ->build();

        $handler = new ElasticsearchHandler($client);
        $handler->setFormatter(new ElasticsearchFormatter($index, '_doc'));

        $monolog = new MonologLogger('elastic', [$handler]);

        return (new Logger($monolog))->withContext(['env' => config('app.env')]);
    }
}

And last we update our environment variables

LOG_CHANNEL=elastic
ELASTIC_PASSWORD=
ELASTIC_CLOUD_ID=

You will find the Elastic Password and your Cloud Id in the Elastic.co deployment.

Now you can use the Log facade and all logs from your application will land at one place.

For example

Log::info('New Order!', [ 'price' => $order->total ]);

You can use this to create various Dashboards for Error reporting und much more stuff.

In another post I will show you how you can auto delete you indices once they are older than a week.