Timber

Timber is a library we use for logging. It works on top of Android's normal Log class and brings some enhancements. With Timber, we can easily disable logging for the release version of our app. Logging is very useful when we are debugging and testing apps, but once the app is in production, we don’t want our debug messages to be seen.

Behavior is added to Timber through Tree instances. You can install an instance by calling Timber.plant. No Tree implementations are installed by default, so anything logged by Timber won’t be seen. Trees should be installed as early as possible. The onCreate() of your application is the most logical choice.

For debug mode, we usually use the DebugTree implementation which comes with Timber and it prints everything to logcat, just like the normal Log class. There is also no need to set TAG because Timber will automatically figure out which class it's being called from and use that class name as its tag.

To do that, simply add this in the onCreate() of your app:

if (BuildConfig.DEBUG) {
    Timber.plant(Timber.DebugTree())
}

You can now call Timber’s static methods to log, just like you would call the ones from Log class:

Timber.d(...)
Timber.i(...)
Timber.v(...)
Timber.e(...)
Timber.w(...)
Timber.wtf(...)

For more information about methods, see the javadoc here.

To add Timber to a project, just add a new dependency in build.gradle:

compile 'com.jakewharton.timber:timber:4.1.0'