What is IrcAppender?

IrcAppender forwards critical log messages to a discussion channel on IRC. It is a great tool to let developer know about bugs, that occurred on a server.

In the past we only learned about errors on our server, if users complained about them. But with IrcAppender, we are actively notified in chat. Having the notifications in chat instead of email allows us to discussion possible solutions with fellow developers right away.

IrcAppender supports both log4j and java.util.logging and has no external dependencies.

How to use IrcAppender?

Setting up IrcAppender for log4j is really easy. No changes to the program code of the monitored application is required, assuming it is already using the wide spread log4j framework for logging.

First add the ircappender.jar to your classpath. And then add the following to your log4j.properties file.

log4j.rootLogger=DEBUG, irc, ...
log4j.appender.irc=net.sf.ircappender.IrcAppender
log4j.appender.irc.host=irchostname.com
log4j.appender.irc.port=6667
log4j.appender.irc.ssl=false
log4j.appender.irc.username=log4jchat
log4j.appender.irc.password=password if needed
log4j.appender.irc.channel=#log4jchatchannel
log4j.appender.irc.buffersize=1000
log4j.appender.irc.buffertype=autopop
log4j.appender.irc.nickname=logtester
log4j.appender.irc.Threshold=ERROR

buffersize: Maximum number of logging entries held in the queue if the irc server is too slow..

News

The following versions have been released:

Version 0.5, released 2011-11-07

Version 0.4, released 2010-05-31

Version 0.3, released 2009-09-21

Version 0.2, released 2009-09-19

Version 0.1, released 2003-03-18

IrcAppender

Logging to IRC