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

In daemon mode every run transition produces one concise line:

2026-05-27 14:03:01 [INFO] run started task=backup run=01J...
2026-05-27 14:03:04 [INFO] run succeeded task=backup run=01J... exit=0 dur=3.5s
2026-05-27 14:07:00 [WARN] 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

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

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

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

Value	Output
auto (default)	Readable 2026-… [INFO] message key=value lines — colored on an interactive terminal, plain everywhere else.
text	The same readable lines, never colored (plain even on a terminal).
json	One JSON object per line — for Docker/k8s log pipelines, Loki, etc.

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

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 [INFO] summary 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

Text output is timestamped 2026-05-27 14:03:01 (local time) 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 a full-precision RFC3339 time field.

Readiness and shutdown

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

[INFO] 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:

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

---

Logs & retention Per-run stdout/stderr capture — the other kind of logs.

Metrics The Prometheus-compatible /metrics endpoint.

Autostart Under systemd, these lines land in journalctl.