Extending Monolog

Monolog is fully extensible, allowing you to adapt your logger to your needs.

Understanding log records

See the page about log records to learn what makes up a log record before going further. This is essential to understand as all Handlers/Formatters/Processors need to deal with log records in one way or another.

Writing your own handler

Monolog provides many built-in handlers. But if the one you need does not exist, you can write it and use it in your logger. The only requirement is to implement Monolog\Handler\HandlerInterface.

Let’s write a PDOHandler to log records to a database. We will extend the abstract class provided by Monolog to keep things DRY.

<?php

use Monolog\Level;
use Monolog\Logger;
use Monolog\LogRecord;
use Monolog\Handler\AbstractProcessingHandler;

class PDOHandler extends AbstractProcessingHandler
{
    private bool $initialized = false;
    private PDO $pdo;
    private PDOStatement $statement;

    public function __construct(PDO $pdo, int|string|Level $level = Level::Debug, bool $bubble = true)
    {
        $this->pdo = $pdo;
        parent::__construct($level, $bubble);
    }

    protected function write(LogRecord $record): void
    {
        if (!$this->initialized) {
            $this->initialize();
        }

        $this->statement->execute(array(
            'channel' => $record->channel,
            'level' => $record->level,
            'message' => $record->formatted,
            'time' => $record->datetime->format('U'),
        ));
    }

    private function initialize()
    {
        $this->pdo->exec(
            'CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS monolog '
            .'(channel VARCHAR(255), level INTEGER, message LONGTEXT, time INTEGER UNSIGNED)'
        );
        $this->statement = $this->pdo->prepare(
            'INSERT INTO monolog (channel, level, message, time) VALUES (:channel, :level, :message, :time)'
        );

        $this->initialized = true;
    }
}

You can now use this handler in your logger:

<?php

$logger->pushHandler(new PDOHandler(new PDO('sqlite:logs.sqlite')));

// You can now use your logger
$logger->info('My logger is now ready');

The Monolog\Handler\AbstractProcessingHandler class provides most of the logic needed for the handler, including the use of processors and the formatting of the record (which is why we use $record->formatted instead of $record->message).

← Utility classes