Getting Started

Install RLG, emit your first log, and verify output — all in under five minutes.

1. Add the Dependency

[dependencies]
rlg = "0.0.14"

To ship records to an OpenTelemetry Collector (which forwards them to Grafana Loki, Honeycomb and others), add the rlg-otlp crate. It sends plain OTLP/HTTP to a Collector on localhost:4318; the Collector owns TLS towards the backend:

rlg-otlp = "0.0.14"

2. Initialise and Log

Call init::init() once at startup. Store the returned FlushGuard — dropping it flushes all buffered events and shuts down the background thread.

use rlg::init;
use rlg::log::Log;
use rlg::log_format::LogFormat;

fn main() {
    let _guard = init::init().expect("failed to initialise RLG");

    Log::info("System initialisation complete")
        .component("kernel")
        .with("version", "0.0.7")
        .format(LogFormat::JSON)
        .fire();
}

fire() pushes the event into a ring buffer and returns immediately. The background flusher thread handles formatting and I/O.

3. Enable the TUI Dashboard

Set RLG_TUI=1 to display a live metrics dashboard in your terminal:

RLG_TUI=1 cargo run

The dashboard shows throughput, error rates, active spans, and format distribution at 60 FPS.

4. Verify Platform-Native Output

RLG routes logs to your OS-native sink automatically:

• macOS — appears in Console.app via os_log:

  log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.rlg.logger"' --last 1m
  

• Linux — appears in the systemd journal via journald:

  journalctl -t rlg --since "1 min ago"
  

If neither sink is available, RLG falls back to the configured file path or stdout.

Next Steps

• Fluent API — chain .with(), .component(), .format(), then .fire()
• Engine Design — how the ring buffer and flusher thread work