All of us have various debugging techniques we prefer. Some like features provided by powerful IDEs (Visual Studio, RubyMine, Eclipse), others use vim, Sublime or Atom.

I have been using pry and byebug. But sometimes you just need/want to do Rails.logger.debug. Except you development.log is chock full of other information. So you put things like “foobar” or your first name in the log messages and search for that.

Another technique I recently discovered is create custom file using multi_logger. You can create an initializers with MultiLogger.add_logger(‘foobar’). Then in your code you can call Rails.logger.foobar.debug(‘error message here’).

Much easier to tail log/foobar.log and see only the messages that you care about. Not a huge post but something I wanted to share. As I think of more ideas I will add them here.