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

• added support for java.util.logging in addition to log4j
• replaced very old version of PircBot with an extremely simple self written IRC client
• added support for SSL connections

Version 0.4, released 2010-05-31

• added configuration setting "port" (default 6667)
• now the "#" is added in front of the channel name only if there is not already one
• automatic reconnect

Version 0.3, released 2009-09-21

• created a small binary only distribution in addition to the complete one (fixes #2862528)
• added a build script (fixes #2862299)
• delay between massages can be configured now (defaults to 1 second). Do not set it to a lower value on public irc-serves.
• don't mess with stdout unless there is an error
• output of sent data is now optional
• deactivated debug option on default
• added a very simple test application

Version 0.2, released 2009-09-19

• fixed ClassCastException on logging of non-String objects (parts of patch #1471866).
• untangled dependencies, reimplemented Fifo.java which was only available as binary, split .jar files
• the package path is now "net.sf.ircappender"
• migrated the content of the 0.1 release to CVS for further development
• nhnb adopted the project after it seemed dead for years and vuud is unfortunately not reachable anymore. I'd like to thank him for writing and releasing this wonderful tool.

Version 0.1, released 2003-03-18

• vuud released the first version of IrcAppender to the public under the Apache Software License.