Python PEP 391: Dictionary-Based Configuration For Logging

The logging module is very flexible; applications can define a tree of logging subsystems, and each logger in this tree can filter out certain messages, format them differently, and direct messages to a varying number of handlers.

All this flexibility can require a lot of configuration. You can write Python statements to create objects and set their properties, but a complex set-up requires verbose but boring code. logging also supports a fileConfig() function that parses a file, but the file format doesn’t support configuring filters, and it’s messier to generate programmatically.

Python 2.7 adds a dictConfig() function that uses a dictionary to configure logging. There are many ways to produce a dictionary from different sources: construct one with code; parse a file containing JSON; or use a YAML parsing library if one is installed. For more information see Configuration functions.

The following example configures two loggers, the root logger and a logger named “network”. Messages sent to the root logger will be sent to the system log using the syslog protocol, and messages to the “network” logger will be written to a network.log file that will be rotated once the log reaches 1MB.

import logging
import logging.config

configdict = {
 'version': 1,    # Configuration schema in use; must be 1 for now
 'formatters': {
     'standard': {
         'format': ('%(asctime)s %(name)-15s '
                    '%(levelname)-8s %(message)s')}},

 'handlers': {'netlog': {'backupCount': 10,
                     'class': 'logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler',
                     'filename': '/logs/network.log',
                     'formatter': 'standard',
                     'level': 'INFO',
                     'maxBytes': 1000000},
              'syslog': {'class': 'logging.handlers.SysLogHandler',
                         'formatter': 'standard',
                         'level': 'ERROR'}},

 # Specify all the subordinate loggers
 'loggers': {
             'network': {
                         'handlers': ['netlog']
             }
 },
 # Specify properties of the root logger
 'root': {
          'handlers': ['syslog']
 },
}

# Set up configuration
logging.config.dictConfig(configdict)

# As an example, log two error messages
logger = logging.getLogger('/')
logger.error('Database not found')

netlogger = logging.getLogger('network')
netlogger.error('Connection failed')

Three smaller enhancements to the logging module, all implemented by Vinay Sajip, are:

• The SysLogHandler class now supports syslogging over TCP. The constructor has a socktype parameter giving the type of socket to use, either socket.SOCK_DGRAM for UDP or socket.SOCK_STREAM for TCP. The default protocol remains UDP.
• Logger instances gained a getChild() method that retrieves a descendant logger using a relative path. For example, once you retrieve a logger by doing log = getLogger('app'), calling log.getChild('network.listen') is equivalent to getLogger('app.network.listen').
• The LoggerAdapter class gained an isEnabledFor() method that takes a level and returns whether the underlying logger would process a message of that level of importance.

See also

PEP 391 - Dictionary-Based Configuration For Logging

PEP written and implemented by Vinay Sajip.