WordPress Logging Helper

Recently I developed a simple plugin, and to ease debugging – I decided to create a simplistic logging solution.

This came in the form of a helper class, that I incorporated in the plugin.

I used just a few properties

    protected string $prefix = 'plugin_log_';
    protected string $log_dir;
    protected string $log_file;
    protected int $max_log_files = 30;

Then the constructor.

    public function __construct()
    {
        $uploads = wp_upload_dir(null, false)['basedir']; //getting the uploads directory
        $logs_dir = "{$uploads}/{$this->prefix}" //the name of the directory;
        if (!is_dir($logs_dir)) {
            mkdir($logs_dir, 0755, true); //creating the directory if it doesn't exist
        }
        $this->log_dir = $logs_dir;
        $this->log_file = "{$logs_dir}/{$this->prefix}" . date("Y.m.d") . '.log';
        $this->init();
    }

Then a simple cleanup function (I haven’t thoroughly tested it though)

    protected function cleanup()
    {
        $file_list = scandir($this->log_dir);
        $file_list = array_diff($file_list, ['.', '..']);

        foreach ($file_list as $idx => $file) {
            if (!preg_match("/{$this->prefix}_\d{4}\.\d{2}\.\d{2}\.log/", $file)) { //removing non logs
                unlink("{$this->log_dir}/{$file}");
                unset($file_list[$idx]);
            }
        }

        $file_count = count($file_list);
        if ($file_count > $this->max_log_files) {
            $to_delete = array_slice($file_list, 0,($file_count - $this->max_log_files) - 1); //array of oldest
            foreach ($to_delete as $file) {
                if ($file === $this->log_file) {
                    continue;
                }
                unlink("{$this->log_dir}/{$file}");
            }
        }
    }

Then the initializer

    public function init()
    {
        $this->cleanup();
        if (!file_exists($this->log_file)) {
            fopen($this->log_file, 'w');
        }
    }

And all the heavy lifting is done by this method:

    public function event($event, $type = 'Event')
    {
        $log_string = date("Y.m.d H:i:s") . " {$type}: {$event}";
        file_put_contents(
            $this->log_file,
            $log_string . PHP_EOL,
            FILE_APPEND | LOCK_EX
        );
    }

I’ve made several other methods that call event() with predefined types such as error.

This was really hastly created class, to ease with the debugging of a project we’re under immense pressure to deliver in impossible deadlines. In the future I plan to try to incorporate this into WordPress’ logging system, so such events could be seen in the WP’s web panel.