How-to logging in python Python 10.11.2013

Logging introduce many advantages

• output to multiple destinations;
• different levels of urgency for messages;
• save execution of process to file;
• put a timestamp to each message.

The main parts of the logging are Logger, Handler and Formatter.

• Loggers expose the interface that application code directly uses.
• Handlers send the log records (created by loggers) to the appropriate destination.
• Filters provide a finer grained facility for determining which log records to output.
• Formatters specify the layout of log records in the final output.

Logger also has a few convenience methods defined - debug, warning, error, critical and so on, each of which has a pre-defined severity level.

Formatter is responsible for converting a LogRecord to a string which can be interpreted by either a human or an external system. The LogRecord has a number of attributes.

There are many Handlers

• StreamHandler - logging to a stream (default, sys.stderr);
• FileHandler - logging to disk files;
• RotatingFileHandler - logging to disk files with support for rotating;
• SocketHandler - logging to a streaming socket;
• DatagramHandler - logging to a UDP socket;
• SMTPHandler - logging to an email address;
• SysLogHandler - logging to Unix syslog;
• MemoryHandler - buffering records in memory until a specific trigger occurs;
• HTTPHandler - sends events to a Web server using either GET or POST semantics.

Log to the screen using base settings

import logging
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG, format='%(asctime)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s')
logging.debug('debug message')

Log to file using base settings

import logging
logging.basicConfig(filename='file.log', level=logging.DEBUG, format='%(asctime)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s')
logging.debug('debug message')

Log to file using object

import logging
l = logging.getLogger('boo')
l.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

fh = logging.FileHandler('boo.log')
fh.setLevel(logging.WARNING)

frmt = logging.Formatter('%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s')
fh.setFormatter(frmt)

l.addHandler(fh)
l.warn('warn message')

Let's log to different places (file and screen)

import logging
l = logging.getLogger()
l.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

frmt = logging.Formatter('%(asctime)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s')

fh = logging.FileHandler('file.log')
fh.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
fh.setFormatter(frmt)
l.addHandler(fh)

sh = logging.StreamHandler()
sh.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
sh.setFormatter(formatter)
l.addHandler(sh)

l.debug('debug message')