Log the activity of your users

Description

This Laravel package provides a very easy to use solution to log the activities of the users of your Laravel app. All the activities will be logged in a db-table. Optionally the activities can also be logged against the default Laravel Log Handler.

This package was originally created by Spatie, a webdesign agency in Antwerp, Belgium. It was forked on 2020-04-01 by GE Tracker and renamed, as we make use of this package in our production application.

Installation

This package can be installed through Composer.

composer require ge-tracker/basic-activity-log

This service provider will automatically be registered.

You'll also need to publish and run the migration in order to create the db-table.

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="GeTracker\BasicActivityLog\BasicActivityLogServiceProvider" --tag="migrations"
php artisan migrate

Optionally you can publish the config file of this package.

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="GeTracker\BasicActivityLog\BasicActivityLogServiceProvider" --tag="config"

The configuration will be written to config/basic-basic-activitylog.php. The options provided are self explanatory.

Usage

Manual logging

Logging some activity is very simple.

//at the top of your file you should import the facade.
use Activity;
...
/*
  The log-function takes two parameters:
  	- $text: the activity you wish to log.
  	- $user: optional can be an user id or a user object.
  	         if not proved the id of Auth::user() will be used

*/
Activity::log('Some activity that you wish to log');

The string you pass to function gets written in a db-table together with a timestamp, the ip address and the user agent of the user.

Log model events

This package can log the events from your models. To do so your model must use the LogsActivity-trait and implement LogsActivityInterface.

use GeTracker\BasicActivityLog\Contracts\LogsActivity as LogsActivityContract;
use GeTracker\BasicActivityLog\LogsActivity;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Article extends Model implements LogsActivityContract
{
   use LogsActivity;
...

The interface expects you to implement the getActivityDescriptionForEvent-function.

Here's an example of a possible implementation.

/**
 * Get the message that needs to be logged for the given event name.
 *
 * @param string $eventName
 * @return string
 */
public function getActivityDescriptionForEvent($eventName)
{
    if ($eventName == 'created')
    {
        return 'Article "' . $this->name . '" was created';
    }

    if ($eventName == 'updated')
    {
        return 'Article "' . $this->name . '" was updated';
    }

    if ($eventName == 'deleted')
    {
        return 'Article "' . $this->name . '" was deleted';
    }

    return '';
}

The result of this function will be logged, unless the result is an empty string.

Using a before handler.

If you want to disable logging under certain conditions, such as for a specific user, create a class in your application namespace that implements the GeTracker\BasicActivityLog\Contracts\BeforeHandlerInterface.

This interface defines an shouldLog() method in which you can code any custom logic to determine whether logging should be ignored or not. You must return true the call should be logged.

To en the namespaced class name to the beforeHandler field in the configuration file:

'beforeHandler' => '\App\Handlers\BeforeHandler',

For example, this callback class could look like this to disable logging a user with id of 1:

<?php

namespace App\Handlers;

use GeTracker\BasicActivityLog\Contracts\BeforeHandler;

class BeforeHandler implements BeforeHandler
{
    public function shouldLog($text, $userId)
	{
		if ($userId == 1) {return false;}

		return true;
	}
}

Retrieving logged entries

All events will be logged in the activity_log-table. This package provides an Eloquent model to work with the table. You can use all the normal Eloquent methods that you know and love. Here's how you can get the last 100 activities together with the associated users.

use GeTracker\BasicActivityLog\Models\Activity;

$latestActivities = Activity::with('user')->latest()->limit(100)->get();

Cleaning up the log

Over time your log will grow. To clean up the database table you can run this command:

Activity::cleanLog();

By default records older than 2 months will be deleted. The number of months can be modified in the config-file of the package.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Security

If you discover any security related issues, please email [email protected] instead of using the issue tracker.

Credits

• Freek Van der Herten
• GE Tracker
• All Contributors

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.