Minimize or disable WEBrick logging

Bob Showalter — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 22:22:00 -0400

I wrote a simple application today that used WEBrick servlets to serve up some content, and I wanted to minimize the logging that WEBrick puts out.

There are two kings of logging used by WEBrick:

Server logging, which is controlled by the :Server parameter passed to WEBrick::HTTPServer.new. This uses syslog-style log levels.
Access logging, which is controlled by the :AccessLog parameter. This logs each request, and is similar to the Apache access log.

The default server log level is INFO, but I wanted to change it to WARN. I also wanted to disable Access logging altogether.

Here’s what I ended up using:

include WEBrick
server = HTTPServer.new(
  :Port => 8000,
  :Logger => Log.new(nil, BasicLog::WARN),
  :AccessLog => []
)

Now the server is silent unless an unexpected problem occurs.

acts_as_developer: Minimize or disable WEBrick logging