All logging and command line error messages are totally broken in master ["solved"]

Rocket Version

master

Operating System

Debian 13

Rust Toolchain Version

rustc 1.97.1 (8bab26f4f 2026-07-14)

What happened?

When I run a Rocket app from the most recent release (0.5.1), if I do not specify a log_level as described here, a helpful debug output goes to stdout. If I upgrade my Rocket app to the newest master commit 3a54d079aef (or even any master as recent as 042b6458e7bc53), this debug output disappears. This is not a defaults problem; adding a Rocket.toml with explicit [default]\nlog_level="debug" does not cause the output to reappear.

In addition to regular logs being missing, error messages do not appear. For example imagine I misconfigure my Rocket.toml such I have [default]\naddress="192.168.0.1" but in fact my address is 192.168.0.2. This causes Rocket to immediately quit on launch, but there is no error message indicating why. Similarly [default]\nlog_level=debug (incorrect due to lack of quotation marks) will cause a Rust panic, with an unhelpful stack trace, again without an error message. 0.5.1 would have printed clear errors in any of these cases, even with log_level="off".

As a final odd note, as mentioned, with [default]\nlog_level="debug" the app runs but if I change it to [default]\nlog_level="normal" in master, the app immediately quits with no error message, as if it had aborted on a non-allowed value in the toml. (docs/guide/10-configuration.md continues, in master, to describe "normal" as an allowed value and in fact the default value in debug mode).

Test Case

Here is a sample project I made: https://codeberg.org/mcc/rocket-hello

To run it, try:

(cd client && npm install) && (cd client && npx webpack) && cargo run -p rkth-server

Running with git commit 17c58e7cffc98fa, this uses 0.5.1. To run this same example with newest master, edit server/Cargo.toml and replace the rocket line with

rocket = { git = "https://github.com/rwf2/Rocket", rev = "3a54d079aef", default-features=false, features = ["json"] }

Log Output

$ ROCKET_LOG_LEVEL=debug cargo run -p rkth-server
    Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.17s
     Running `target/debug/rkth-server`

...And that's literally it

Additional Context

I understand master branch is not necessarily supported, but I am developing an application which depends on PR #2970 and 2970 rests atop master, so this is severely impacting my development. master has been in this state since at least last October.

System Checks

• My bug report relates to functionality.
• I have tested against the latest Rocket release or a recent git commit.
• I have tested against the latest stable rustc toolchain.
• I was unable to find this issue previously reported.