How do I enable/disable log levels in Android?

Question

The Android Documentation says the following about Log Levels:

Verbose should never be compiled into an application except during development. Debug logs are compiled in but stripped at runtime. Error, warning and info logs are always kept.

So you may want to consider stripping the log Verbose logging statements out, possibly using ProGuard as suggested in another answer.

According to the documentation, you can configure logging on a development device using System Properties. The property to set is log.tag.<YourTag> and it should be set to one of the following values: VERBOSE, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, ASSERT, or SUPPRESS. More information on this is available in the documentation for the isLoggable() method.

You can set properties temporarily using the setprop command. For example:

C:\android>adb shell setprop log.tag.MyAppTag WARN
C:\android>adb shell getprop log.tag.MyAppTag
WARN

Alternatively, you can specify them in the file '/data/local.prop' as follows:

log.tag.MyAppTag=WARN

Later versions of Android appear to require that /data/local.prop be read only. This file is read at boot time so you'll need to restart after updating it. If /data/local.prop is world writable, it will likely be ignored.

Finally, you can set them programmatically using the System.setProperty() method.

The easiest way is probably to run your compiled JAR through ProGuard before deployment, with a config like:

-assumenosideeffects class android.util.Log {
    public static int v(...);
}

That will — aside from all the other ProGuard optimisations — remove any verbose log statements directly from the bytecode.

A common way is to make an int named loglevel, and define its debug level based on loglevel.

public static int LOGLEVEL = 2;
public static boolean ERROR = LOGLEVEL > 0;
public static boolean WARN = LOGLEVEL > 1;
...
public static boolean VERBOSE = LOGLEVEL > 4;

    if (VERBOSE) Log.v(TAG, "Message here"); // Won't be shown
    if (WARN) Log.w(TAG, "WARNING HERE");    // Still goes through

Later, you can just change the LOGLEVEL for all debug output level.

I took a simple route - creating a wrapper class that also makes use of variable parameter lists.

 public class Log{
        public static int LEVEL = android.util.Log.WARN;


    static public void d(String tag, String msgFormat, Object...args)
    {
        if (LEVEL<=android.util.Log.DEBUG)
        {
            android.util.Log.d(tag, String.format(msgFormat, args));
        }
    }

    static public void d(String tag, Throwable t, String msgFormat, Object...args)
    {
        if (LEVEL<=android.util.Log.DEBUG)
        {
            android.util.Log.d(tag, String.format(msgFormat, args), t);
        }
    }

    //...other level logging functions snipped

The better way is to use SLF4J API + some of its implementation.

For Android applications you can use the following:

1. Android Logger is the lightweight but easy-to-configure SLF4J implementation (< 50 Kb).
2. LOGBack is the most powerful and optimized implementation but its size is about 1 Mb.
3. Any other by your taste: slf4j-android, slf4android.

You should use

    if (Log.isLoggable(TAG, Log.VERBOSE)) {
        Log.v(TAG, "my log message");
    }