Hi all!

For a long time, tool developers have had the option to log their actions to a tool-specific server admin log (SAL), by sending messages like !log tools.*toolname* *text* to #wikimedia-cloud. This lets you and others keep track of which changes were made at what time, in case a problem is discovered later. However, to log messages you need to be on IRC, which can be inconvenient or even impossible on weak internet connections (I sometimes work on tools on the train, where the connection is just good enough for mosh https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:GoToLinkedPage/enwiki/Q15992114 but not really for IRC).

Instead, you can now use the dologmsg command, which was implemented at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Prague (T222244 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T222244). Call it with your message as the argument(s), and it will relay it to #wikimedia-cloud through wm-bot, automatically including the tool name and the real user name of the caller. For example, when I ran the command

dologmsg 'deployed 83d01bb93b (background UI improvements)'

the following entry was added to the QuickCategories SAL https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nova_Resource:Tools.quickcategories/SAL :

09:37 wm-bot: <lucaswerkmeister> deployed 83d01bb93b (background UI

improvements)

You can also watch this in action in a demo screencast https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toolforge_dologmsg_QuickCategories_demo.webm. Of course, you can still log directly to #wikimedia-cloud, but I hope that doing it from the same shell where you also do your work will be more convenient :)

Cheers, Lucas