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RunWisp

Logging

When you run runwisp daemon (in Docker, under systemd, or on a VPS), the daemon is your only window into what’s happening — there’s no TUI in front of it. So it talks: a line every time a task starts, succeeds, or fails, plus startup, readiness, and shutdown detail. This page covers how to tune that output.

These are operational knobs, not task configuration — so they live on flags and environment variables, never in runwisp.toml. (Your tasks are the source of truth; how the daemon logs about them is not.)

Run-lifecycle lines

Section titled “Run-lifecycle lines”

In daemon mode every run transition produces one concise line:

time=2026-05-27T14:03:01.412+02:00 level=INFO msg="run started" task=backup run=01J...
time=2026-05-27T14:03:04.918+02:00 level=INFO msg="run succeeded" task=backup run=01J... exit=0 dur=3.5s
time=2026-05-27T14:07:00.231+02:00 level=WARN msg="run failed" task=report run=01J... exit=2 reason=failed dur=412ms

That’s it — start, success, failure, and a warning if a task hits the disk-space limit. Per-output-line capture still goes to the per-run log files; these lines are the high-level heartbeat, not a replacement for them.

Level

Section titled “Level”

--log-level (or RUNWISP_LOG_LEVEL) takes debug, info (default), warn, or error:

Terminal window
runwisp daemon --log-level debug
RUNWISP_LOG_LEVEL=debug runwisp daemon

An unrecognized value is rejected with a clear error and a non-zero exit — there’s no silent fallback to info.

Format

Section titled “Format”

--log-format (or RUNWISP_LOG_FORMAT) picks the shape:

ValueOutput
auto (default)Colored text on an interactive terminal; plain text everywhere else.
textText handler (color still gated by TTY / NO_COLOR).
jsonOne JSON object per line — for Docker/k8s log pipelines, Loki, etc.
Terminal window
RUNWISP_LOG_FORMAT=json runwisp daemon
{
    "time": "2026-05-27T14:03:04.918+02:00",
    "level": "INFO",
    "msg": "run succeeded",
    "task": "backup",
    "run": "01J...",
    "exit": 0,
    "dur": 3500000000
}

Clean logs when piped

Section titled “Clean logs when piped”

RunWisp detects whether stderr is a real terminal. When it isn’t — piped into docker logs, journald, or a file — it automatically:

  • drops ANSI color (so you don’t get escape-code garbage in your log files), and
  • replaces the multi-section startup banner with a handful of plain msg=... lines carrying the same facts (version, paths, task count, warnings).

The standard NO_COLOR environment variable also disables color on a terminal, and --log-format=json is always colorless.

Timestamps

Section titled “Timestamps”

Text output is timestamped with RFC3339 (millisecond precision) in daemon mode — a long-running process needs to record when things happened. The one exception: under systemd (detected via JOURNAL_STREAM), RunWisp drops its own timestamps because journald already prepends them. JSON output always keeps the time field.

Readiness and shutdown

Section titled “Readiness and shutdown”

Once the daemon’s local API answers, it logs an accurate readiness line:

msg="ready, listening" url=http://localhost:9477

The URL respects [daemon] external_url when set, and maps a wildcard --host 0.0.0.0 bind to localhost (the address you actually connect to).

On Ctrl+C / SIGTERM the daemon names the signal, narrates the drain (HTTP requests, then scheduler and in-flight runs), and prints the total elapsed time:

msg="received signal, shutting down" signal=interrupt
msg="draining HTTP requests and closing cloud connection"
msg="stopping scheduler and waiting for in-flight runs" in_flight=1 timeout=30s
msg="shutdown complete" elapsed=842ms