Logging

To add your own lines to the node’s output you should use the CCF_APP_* macros defined in ccf/ds/logger.h:

#include "ccf/ds/logger.h"

int x = 5;
CCF_APP_INFO("x is currently {}", x);

Applications written in JavaScript and TypeScript can produce similar log lines using standard functions console.log, console.info, console.warn, and console.error:

x = 5
console.info(`x is ${x}`)

Either approach will produce a line in the node’s stdout like:

2022-07-12T12:34:56.626262Z        0   [info ][app] ../src/my_app/my_app.cpp:42    | x is 5

These logging functions do several things:

  • Variable substitution. See libfmt for more details of the formatting syntax used in C++

  • Declare the severity of the entry. CCF defines 5 levels (trace, debug, info, fail, and fatal), and production nodes will generally ignore entries below info

  • Prefix formatted metadata. The produced log line will include a timestamp, the name and line number where the line was produced, and an [app] tag

  • Write without an ECALL. The final write must be handled by the host, so writing directly from the enclave would require an expensive ECALL. Instead these macros will queue writes to a ringbuffer for the host to process, so diagnostic logging should not cause significant performance drops

The most-verbose lines which are emitted may be restricted at build-time, if required for security on that platform. On SGX, the CCF_APP_TRACE and CCF_APP_DEBUG macros are disabled at compile-time, to avoid leaking confidential information during execution. To enable these, define VERBOSE_LOGGING before including logger.h in your application code. The unsafe build variants of CCF include verbose logging of the framework itself, but this can be used independently of verbose logging in the application code.

Note

The app’s logging entries will be interleaved (line-by-line) with the framework’s logging messages. Filter for entries containing [app] to extract only application log lines.

Note

Since these logs are produced during execution, they will generally only appear on a single node and not every replica. They may also log information about uncommitted or re-executed transactions, as they are emitted independently of transaction commit.