New Feature: Runtime Logs

You can now access application logs via the new vip logs command!

Runtime Logs provides an aggregated, near real-time view into recent application logs generated by your WordPress and Node applications running on VIP Cloud. These logs can provide insights into the current health of an application and can be helpful for debugging issues.

For WordPress applications, you’ll get visibility into PHP Errors including fatals and warnings as well as any logs that are output using the error_log() function. For Node applications, you’ll get all output sent to stdout or stderr (e.g. via console class).

Our documentation for Runtime Logs has details about this new VIP-CLI command including options for alternate output formats and special considerations. Please note that you’ll need VIP-CLI 2.7.0 or higher to use this.

In an upcoming release, we’ll be adding support for “tailing”, which will auto-fetch new log entries. We’re also exploring support for filtering, additional log types, and access to logs via the VIP Dashboard.

We’d love to know what you think including how you hope to use this feature (or what we’re missing); please get in touch!

Update on environment types

A few days after the release of WordPress 5.5, we added support for environment types on VIP Go.

Calling the method wp_get_environment_type() will return the name of the VIP environment, exactly as you can see it in the dashboard. 

This has changed with the release of WordPress 5.5.1, as this version has dropped support for custom environment types, only allowing one of the following types to be set: production, staging, development, local.

Following this change, we are now mapping the VIP environment names to one of the standardized environment types. This means that calling wp_get_environment_type() will return an environment type as follows:

VIP environment name	WP environment type
production	production
develop development	development
any other (preprod, staging, uat…)	staging

If you have any questions about this change and how to use environment types in our code, please open a support ticket, and we’ll be happy to assist.

Environment type support

Edit (2020-09-01): WordPress 5.5.1 removed the ability to define arbitrary labels for environments, and instead requires your to choose from one of four types. The information below is retained for posterity but is no longer valid.

You can learn about the new behavior on VIP on our update post.

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In WordPress 5.5, environment types were introduced to allow plugins to target specific environments for specific functionality. All the details about this new functionality can be found here.

We have now added support for environment types in VIP Go, so this feature can be used to determine the environment where the code is running.

Calling the method wp_get_environment_type() will return the name of the VIP environment, exactly as you can see it in the dashboard. This is an example when run on a typical VIP development env:

<?php
$environment = wp_get_environment_type();
print( $environment );

Result:

development

This allows you to use a standard WordPress method to run different code depending on whether you are running in production, development, or any other environment type you have configured for your application.

If you have any questions about environment types, please open a support ticket, and we’ll be happy to assist.