On the Zend Framework blog there's a new post in their series highlighting components of the main framework. In this new tutorial they look a the Zend-log component and how it can be used for logging in your application.

Every PHP application generates errors, warnings, and notices and throws exceptions. If we do not log this information, we lose a way to identify and solve problems at runtime. Moreover, we may need to log specific actions such as a user login and logout attempts. All such information should be filtered and stored in an efficient way.

[...] Zend Framework offers a logging component, zend-log; the library can be used as a general purpose logging system. It supports multiple log backends, formatting messages sent to the log, and filtering messages from being logged.

The tutorial then walks you through the installation of the component and some basic usage of it to write directory to the 'php://output' stream. It then shows you how to set up custom formatting on the message and a few other examples of it in use:

• logging PHP events (errors/exceptions)
• using the built-in data (level) filtering functionality
• custom processors
• working with multiple backends for storage

The post ends with a look at using the Zend-log package in either a traditional MVC application or one based more on middleware (like an Expressive application).