Feature Request: Centralized Logger Factory with Component-Aware Formatting

[alexskr]

Feature Request: Centralized Logger Factory with Component-Aware Formatting

Summary

Introduce a centralized logger mechanism (NcboCron::LoggerFactory) to standardize how loggers are created across components, with per-component log file support and consistent log line formatting. Also support clean logging to stdout/stderr, which is ideal for containerized environments (e.g., Docker).

Motivation

This proposal continues the work from the #89 that refactored ncbo_cron to respect externally configured log_path and log_dir settings.

Currently, many ncbo_cron components create log files without checking whether the target directory exists or is writable, which can result in:

• File permission errors (e.g., when trying to write to a nonexistent or protected path)
• Inconsistent fallback behavior
• Log files being created unintentionally in bundled gem directories or other shared environments
• Problems with integration in components like ontologies_api that import ncbo_cron

Additionally, the lack of stdout/stderr logging support makes it less than ideal to run ncbo_cron in containerized environments which expect logs to go to stdout

Proposal

Create a module NcboCron::LoggerFactory that:

• Provides a logger_for(component_name) method
• Writes logs to log_path-derived files like scheduler-ontologies-report.log
• Adds a consistent log formatter: [timestamp] [component] [level] message
• Supports logging to stdout/stderr when desired (e.g., in Docker or tests)
• Allows injecting test or shared loggers via use_custom_logger(name, logger)

Example output:

[2024-04-16 09:23:12] [ontologies-report] [INFO] Generating ontology report
[2024-04-16 09:23:14] [index-synchronizer] [DEBUG] Synchronization started