How To Use Google Logging Library (glog)

(as of Fri Jan 25 2013) 

Introduction

Google glog is a library that implements application-level logging. This library provides logging APIs based on C++-style streams and various helper macros. You can log a message by simply streaming things to LOG(<a particular severity level>), e.g.

   #include <glog/logging.h>

   int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
     // Initialize Google's logging library.
     google::InitGoogleLogging(argv[0]);

     // ...
     LOG(INFO) << "Found " << num_cookies << " cookies";
   }

Google glog defines a series of macros that simplify many common logging tasks. You can log messages by severity level, control logging behavior from the command line, log based on conditionals, abort the program when expected conditions are not met, introduce your own verbose logging levels, and more. This document describes the functionality supported by glog. Please note that this document doesn't describe all features in this library, but the most useful ones. If you want to find less common features, please check header files under src/glog directory.

Severity Level

You can specify one of the following severity levels (in increasing order of severity): INFO, WARNING, ERROR, and FATAL. Logging a FATAL message terminates the program (after the message is logged). Note that messages of a given severity are logged not only in the logfile for that severity, but also in all logfiles of lower severity. E.g., a message of severity FATAL will be logged to the logfiles of severity FATAL, ERROR, WARNING, andINFO.

The DFATAL severity logs a FATAL error in debug mode (i.e., there is no NDEBUG macro defined), but avoids halting the program in production by automatically reducing the severity to ERROR.

Unless otherwise specified, glog writes to the filename "/tmp/<program name>.<hostname>.<user name>.log.<severity level>.<date>.<time>.<pid>" (e.g., "/tmp/hello_world.example.com.hamaji.log.INFO.20080709-222411.10474"). By default, glog copies the log messages of severity level ERROR orFATAL to standard error (stderr) in addition to log files.

Setting Flags

Several flags influence glog's output behavior. If the Google gflags library is installed on your machine, the configure script (see the INSTALL file in the package for detail of this script) will automatically detect and use it, allowing you to pass flags on the command line. For example, if you want to turn the flag --logtostderr on, you can start your application with the following command line:

   ./your_application --logtostderr=1

If the Google gflags library isn't installed, you set flags via environment variables, prefixing the flag name with "GLOG_", e.g.

   GLOG_logtostderr=1 ./your_application

The following flags are most commonly used:

logtostderr ( bool, default= false)

Log messages to stderr instead of logfiles.
Note: you can set binary flags to  true by specifying  1,  true, or  yes (case insensitive). Also, you can set binary flags to  false by specifying 0,  false, or  no (again, case insensitive).

stderrthreshold ( int, default=2, which is  ERROR)

Copy log messages at or above this level to stderr in addition to logfiles. The numbers of severity levels  INFO,  WARNING,  ERROR, and  FATAL are 0, 1, 2, and 3,