How to get Rails.logger printing to the console/stdout when running rspec?

For Rails 4.x the log level is configured a bit different than in Rails 3.x

Add this to config/environment/test.rb

# Enable stdout logger
config.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)

# Set log level
config.log_level = :ERROR

The logger level is set on the logger instance from config.log_level at: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/v4.2.4/railties/lib/rails/application/bootstrap.rb#L70

Environment variable

As a bonus, you can allow overwriting the log level using an environment variable with a default value like so:

# default :ERROR
config.log_level = ENV.fetch("LOG_LEVEL", "ERROR")

And then running tests from shell:

# Log level :INFO (the value is uppercased in bootstrap.rb)
$ LOG_LEVEL=info rake test

# Log level :ERROR
$ rake test