Activity Logging

By default, user activities are logged to the activities database table. Logged information includes the activity time and an activity type, the user_id, the user's IP address, and a description of the activity. The administrative interface provides convenient tables for viewing these logs:

Default activity types

The following activity types are logged by the core UserFrosting features:

These activities are only logged when successful. If a user is unable to perform one of these activities, for example because they don't have the necessary permissions or there is some other problem, the attempt won't be logged.

Logging activities

In your controller methods, simply call the info method on the userActivityLogger service to log additional activities:

// Create activity record
$this->ci->userActivityLogger->info("User {$currentUser->user_name} adopted a new owl '{$owl->name}'.", [
    'type' => 'adopt_owl'
]);

The first parameter is the activity description. The second parameter contains an array, which should have a type key defined. The value of this key decides the activity type that will be logged. Note that these activity types are not defined anywhere explicitly - they are stored in the database as plain text and you may create new types on the fly when you log an activity.

In general, you will probably want to log user activities at the end of the controller method, after the user's activity has completed successfully. However, you may choose to write to this log at any point in your code.

Retrieving activities for a user

The activities relation on the User model returns a collection of all activities for a user:

$activities = $user->activities;

The User model also provides a number of helper methods for user activities.

Getting a user's last activity

The id of a user's last activity is 'cached' in the users table under the last_activity_id column. This makes it more efficient to retrieve the user's last activity.

You can get the Activity record for a user's last activity using the lastActivity relation:

$lastActivity = $user->lastActivity;

Notice that we reference this as an model property, rather than calling it as a method. If we called $user->lastActivity() (with parentheses) instead, it would return the relationship rather than the model itself.

Getting a user's last activity by type

If you want to get the last activity of a specific type, use the lastActivityOfType method:

$lastSignIn = $user->lastActivityOfType('sign_in')->get();

Since lastActivityOfType returns a Builder object, we need to call get to return the actual result.

Getting the time of a user's last activity

If we only want the timestamp of a user's last activity, we can can call lastActivityTime:

$lastSignInTime = $user->lastActivityTime('sign_in');

Getting the time since a user's last activity

The getSecondsSinceLastActivity method returns the number of seconds since the last time a user performed a particular activity:

$elapsedTime = $user->getSecondsSinceLastActivity('walked_dog');

Joining a user's last activity on a query

If you are querying the users table using the Eloquent query builder, you can join each user's last activity from the activities table:

$usersWithActivities = User::joinLastActivity()->get();

Logging to other handlers

By default, UserFrosting implements a custom Monolog handler, UserFrosting\Sprinkles\Account\Log\UserActivityDatabaseHandler, that sends user activity logs to the activities database table.

This is all assembled in the userActivityLogger service. If you'd prefer, you can extend or override the userActivityLogger service to add additional handlers, or even completely replace the custom handler altogether.

$container->extend('userActivityLogger', function ($logger, $c) {
    $logFile = $c->get('locator')->findResource('log://activities.log', true, true);

    $handler = new StreamHandler($logFile);

    $logger->pushHandler($handler);

    return $logger;
};

In either case you should always retain the custom UserActivityProcessor, which assembles the information to be logged such as the user_id and the user's IP address.

See the Monolog documentation for more details.