Loggly

How to Enable Logging in Django 1.2

Posted 20 May, 2010 by raffy@loggly.com

On Monday Django 1.2 was released. At Loggly, we highly anticipated this release. We have been running version 1.2 since the early Alpha releases. During the Alpha times, Simon Willison released a patch and proposal/ticket of how to enable logging in Django applications. It looked like the patch would get included in the main Django branch. Can you imagine how disappointed we were when the we realized that the patch didn’t make it into the final release?
Well, what we ended up doing was to patch Django with Simon’s patch. Took me a little while to update the patch to work with the final 1.2 release. If you want to use the patch, download it here. What you need to do then is patch your Django install with this. So, download the Django 1.2 tar ball and do the following:

tar -xzf Django-1.2.tar.gz
cd Django-1.2
patch -p0 < /tmp/django_logging_1.2.patch
python ./setup.py install

This will include the patch into your Django distro and install it. As a next step, you configure your application for logging by adding a snippet similar to the following in your settings.py file:

LOGGING = {
    'loggly_feature': {
        'handler': 'logging.handlers.SysLogHandler',
        'address': ('localhost', 514),
        'facility': 'local3',
        'level': 'INFO',
        'format': 'loggly: %(message)s',        # does not include the severity. it's features, baby!
    },
}

From there you use the following code snippet to log out of your application:

import logging
logs = logging.getLogger('loggly_feature')
logs.error("message")

More information about how to use the logging libraries you find in the Python documentation. It also seems like Django 1.3 will have logging built in. From what I can tell, it looks similar to Simon’s approach, but it’s not quite the same. I’ll keep you posted here!

In my next blog post I will show you how we implemented a logging library for Loggly so that we can very easily log from anywhere within our application.

Django 1.2 Logging Patch

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