How to create Your Own Custom Log File in Laravel

Laravel is a well-known PHP framework for web artisans. In today’s tutorial, we will discuss how to create our own custom log file in Laravel. Logs are a very important part of an application as it records user journey in simple text files, so the administrator can look into these files if there is any problem occurs.

In normal cases, we use the below code to log something in Laravel

Log::debug("Debug Statement");
Log::info("Any information");

Basically, these logs will be saved in storage/logs/laravel.log, but what if we need to create a custom log. For example, when you working with a payment gateway,  you need to log the user or payment gateway responses in logs. If you start logging to laravel.log, which is responsible for many other things such as framework errors, system errors, etc. Indeed, you will have a bad time debugging this payment-related information from a huge file, have a multitude of data.

In other words,  we will have to think about our own custom log file, only responsible for payment-related data.

Open the file config/logging.php, and add the below to channels array

...
'channels' => [
        ...
        'payment' => [
            'driver' => 'single',
            'path' => storage_path('logs/payment_response.log'),
            'level' => 'info',
        ],
....

You are ready to use your custom log, so in any code, just call the log as following

    \Log::channel('payment')->info('Test log from tutsplanet.com');

That’s it