Sending Laravel Production App Logs to Better Stack

I’m using a managed hosting service that uses an ephemeral multi node environment. They’ve been great, but they don’t provide historical logging. Which is a problem. I need this information in case anything goes wrong in production. Ideally, I use the logs to catch something before it turns into a real problem.

If you look in the Laravel documentation, you’ll find a couple third-party channels listed. One of those is Papertrail, which provides pretty decent looking pricing and a generous no credit card free trial. You only get 50mb per month for your log storage though. That might be okay, but I opted for a similar service that allows 1gb per month instead. That service is called Better Stack.

This is how you set it up.

Sign up for a no credit card free account on Better Stack. Once you’re logged in, click on “Connect source”.

Give your source a name and select PHP as your platform. Click “Create source”.

From here, you’ll be given a source token. Click on it to copy it.

In your .env file, add that source token and change your LOG_CHANNEL like this.

BETTERSTACK_SOURCE_TOKEN="AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
LOG_CHANNEL=betterstack

But that channel doesn’t actually exist yet. We’ll create it next, but first let’s install a package that will make that easier. Better Stack used to be called LogTail. Install the logtail package using composer.

composer require logtail/monolog-logtail

Then run composer dump-autoload so that composer refreshes your classmap and the new package’s classes can be found.

Now, within your config/logging.php file, add our new channel to the channels array.

'betterstack' => [
    'driver' => 'monolog',
    'level' => env('LOG_LEVEL', 'debug'),
    'handler' => Logtail\Monolog\LogtailHandler::class,
    'handler_with' => [
        'sourceToken' => env('BETTERSTACK_SOURCE_TOKEN'),
    ],
],

That’s it! You should now be able to tail your logs in Better Stack.

Test it out real quick by adding a log route to your app’s web.php file.

Route::get('/log', function() {
    \Illuminate\Support\Facades\Log::info("Hello BetterStack!");
    return “log sent”;
});

Hit that in your browser. If you get a 404, then clear your route cache with php artisan route:cache.

Now check the Live tail in Better Stack. You should get the log.

Okay! So that will stick around for 3 days. Say you want to archive it. You can hook it up to an S3 bucket, but it’s a little tricky to find after you’ve already created the bucket. I found a link to the S3 Bucket integration in their documentation.

Add your secret key and access key for AWS to your .env file.

Create a private S3 bucket in AWS and give it a bucket policy that looks like this.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "Statement1",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": "the arn of the user that you used to give your app access"
      },
      "Action": [
        "s3:PutObject",
        "s3:GetObject",
        "s3:ListBucket"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:s3:::your-bucket-name",
        "arn:aws:s3:::your-bucket-name/*"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Then fill out the AWS S3 integration form. Better Stack will test your connection. And you’re all set.