I work on an app that logs a bunch of data. Typically, I wouldn’t test logging, but we have some issues where bad pattern matching is causing some 500 errors because it can’t handle the responses we are getting.
After some poking around, I ended up on a cool way in ExUnit to test for specific log messages. But there is one major issue that tripped me u[]
The module is ExUnit.CaptureLog and allows you to pass in a function and check that the log has the message you expect.
On the surface, it’s pretty simple. assert capture_log(fn -> Logger.error(msg) end) =~ msg That will assert that Logger.error(msg) actually logs msg.
Just replace Logger.error(msg) with the function that performs the logging and your all set. Mine looks like this because I know if it got to logging something that contains webhook_received, the code executed properly: assert capture_log(fn -> Persistence.MessageQueue.log_message(event_data) end) =~ "webhook_received"
Unfortunately, I was getting a success message when it clearly wasn’t passing. I really don’t know why. What I do know is that the log setting in config directly effects this, and defaults to :warn. By setting that to :info, messages start to flow through when testing, and the assertions start to actually pass/fail accurately.
You may have already noticed that setting the log messages to info makes for a really noisy test suite. But, there is a way around that also.
I haven’t gotten to it yet, but @tag :capture_log will allow you to define which tests should report logs and which ones shouldn’t.
This forum thread was super helpful.