Configure logging

Goal: control what Loco logs, in what shape, and where — stdout for development, structured JSON for production, and (optionally) a rotating log file — without drowning in third-party crate noise.

Loco’s logger is built on tracing. logger.enable, logger.level, and logger.format are required keys in every config file.

1. Set the minimum config

logger:
  enable: true
  pretty_backtrace: true
  level: debug
  format: compact

level: off | trace | debug | info | warn | error.
format: compact | pretty | json.
pretty_backtrace: when true, forces RUST_BACKTRACE=1 and nicely-formatted panic backtraces. It’s a development convenience — turn it off in performance-sensitive production deployments.

2. Know the filtering precedence

Loco doesn’t just apply level globally to every crate — by default it whitelists a small set of modules (loco_rs, sea_orm_migration, tower_http, sqlx::query, playground, loco_gen) plus your own app crate, and applies level only to those. Everything else stays quiet.

Three ways to control this, in strict precedence order:

RUST_LOG environment variable — if set, it wins outright, ignoring both level and override_filter. Use this for one-off debugging on a running process without touching config:
Terminal window
```
RUST_LOG=debug cargo loco start
```
logger.override_filter — a raw tracing-subscriber EnvFilter directive string. Use this to permanently see traces from libraries outside the built-in whitelist:
```
logger:
  enable: true
  level: info
  format: compact
  override_filter: "trace" # or a directive like "myapp=debug,tower_http=debug"
```
The built-in module whitelist + level — what you get if neither of the above is set. This is the common case: set level and trust Loco’s whitelist to keep noise down.

3. Choose a format per environment

compact — human-readable single-line output; good default for local development.
pretty — multi-line, more spacious human-readable output.
json — structured, one JSON object per line; use this in production so a log aggregator (Loki, CloudWatch, Datadog, etc.) can parse fields directly.

logger:
  enable: true
  pretty_backtrace: false
  level: info
  format: json

4. Add a rotating file appender

file_appender writes logs to disk independently of (and with its own level/format, separate from) the stdout logger — useful when you want stdout kept quiet but still capture a full trail on disk.

logger:
  enable: true
  level: info
  format: compact
  file_appender:
    enable: true
    non_blocking: false   # true offloads writes to a background thread
    level: debug
    format: json
    rotation: daily       # minutely | hourly | daily | never — default is hourly
    dir: ./logs           # default "./logs" if omitted
    filename_prefix: myapp
    filename_suffix: log
    max_log_files: 7      # required — old files beyond this count are pruned

With rotation: daily and the settings above, you’ll get files like ./logs/myapp.<date>.log, rotated once a day, with only the newest 7 kept around.

5. Verify

Start the app and confirm the shape you expect shows up:

cargo loco start
# ... watch stdout for compact/pretty/json-formatted lines at the level you set

If you enabled a file appender, tail the log directory:

tail -f ./logs/*.log

To confirm the filtering precedence, try overriding at runtime without touching the config file:

RUST_LOG=loco_rs=trace cargo loco start

You should see much more verbose output than logger.level alone would produce — confirming RUST_LOG took precedence.

Reference

Every logger: YAML key, including all file_appender sub-keys: Configuration reference § logger