Logging¶

Logging is fun. We all want to be lumberjacks. My muscle-memory wants to put print statements everywhere, but it’s better to use log.debug instead. Plus, django-debug-toolbar can hijack the logger and show all the log statements generated during the last request. When DEBUG = True, all logs will be printed to the development console where you started the server. In production, we’re piping everything into syslog.

Configuration¶

The root logger is set up from log_settings.py in the base of zamboni’s tree. It sets up sensible defaults, but you can twiddle with these settings:

LOG_LEVEL

This setting is required, and defaults to loggging.DEBUG, which will let just about anything pass through. To reconfigure, import logging in your settings file and pick a different level:

import logging
LOG_LEVEL = logging.WARN

HAS_SYSLOG

Set this to False if you don’t want logging sent to syslog when DEBUG is False.

LOGGING

See PEP 391 and log_settings.py for formatting help. Each section of LOGGING will get merged into the corresponding section of log_settings.py. Handlers and log levels are set up automatically based on LOG_LEVEL and DEBUG unless you set them here. Messages will not propagate through a logger unless propagate: True is set.

LOGGING = {
    'loggers': {
        'foobar': {'handlers': ['null']},
    },
}

If you want to add more to this in settings_local.py, do something like this:

LOGGING['loggers'].update({
    'z.paypal': {
        'level': logging.DEBUG,
    },
    'z.elasticsearch': {
        'handlers': ['null'],
    },
})

Using Loggers¶

The logging package uses global objects to make the same logging configuration available to all code loaded in the interpreter. Loggers are created in a pseudo-namespace structure, so app-level loggers can inherit settings from a root logger. zamboni’s root namespace is just "z", in the interest of brevity. In the foobar package, we create a logger that inherits the configuration by naming it "z.foobar":

import commonware.log

log = commonware.log.getLogger('z.foobar')

log.debug("I'm in the foobar package.")

Logs can be nested as much as you want. Maintaining log namespaces is useful because we can turn up the logging output for a particular section of zamboni without becoming overwhelmed with logging from all other parts.

commonware.log vs. logging¶

commonware.log.getLogger should be used inside the request cycle. It returns a LoggingAdapter that inserts the current user’s IP address into the log message.

Complete logging docs: http://docs.python.org/library/logging.html