ASCII codes logs

[raindog308]

My logs have strange codes that look like ASCII codes:

Aug 12 14:34:18 mail inbucket[18299]: #033[90m2:34PM#033[0m #033[32mINF#033[0m Inbucket starting #033[36mbuildDate=#033[0mundefined #033[36mphase=#033[0mstartup #033[36mversion=#033[0mundefined
Aug 12 14:34:18 mail inbucket[18299]: #033[90m2:34PM#033[0m #033[32mINF#033[0m Retention configured for 1317600h0m0s #033[36mmodule=#033[0mstorage #033[36mphase=#033[0mstartup
Aug 12 14:34:18 mail inbucket[18299]: #033[90m2:34PM#033[0m #033[32mINF#033[0m Web UI content mapped #033[36mmodule=#033[0mweb #033[36mpath=#033[0mui/dist #033[36mphase=#033[0mstartup

Every single line in the logs looks like this. Is this normal? Can it be changed/suppressed? Thanks.

[jhillyerd]

You can start it with -logjson as an argument to switch the format to a structured JSON log.

I should look into moving that to an environment variable like the rest of the config.

[raindog308]

I think I meant ANSI color codes, not ASCII.

I'm not sure hard-to-read-json is better than hard-to-read-with-embedded-ANSI-codes.

I've never seen software that emits ANSI codes (if that's what these are) in the logs - is there some kind of environment variable or setting that simply eliminates them?

Looks like the rs/zerolog package puts them in so they look pretty and colored...but that doesn't seem to translate well into /var/log/daemon.log, even if I sent my session's TERM to "ansi".

[jhillyerd]

I didn't see a way to change zerolog w/ environment variables, but I think it does support custom formats. I don't see why Inbucket couldn't support a "syslog" style log format along with the other two.

I think the reason it is currently configured via command line is Inbucket used to parse a config file, and that could fail (and be logged), so the log format couldn't be specified in that file. Probably not an issue with env vars.