Question

How would I be able to find which module is overriding the Python root logger?

My Django project imports from quite a few external packages, and I have tried searching for all instances of logging.basicConfig and logging.root setups, however most of them are in tests and should not be overriding it unless specifically called.

Django’s logging config does not specify a root logger.

Answer 1

Well the solution was to do some monkey patching of the Python logging module.
I just wrapped a decorator around the logging.root.addHandler function that printed the stack and voila, I found my culprit who was calling logging.getLogger(). If you call getLogger without any parameters, you get the root logger.

import logging
import sys
import traceback
def tracer(func):
    def new_func(*args, **kwargs):
        try:
            traceback.print_stack(sys.stderr)
        except:
            traceback.print_exc(sys.stderr)
        return func(*args, **kwargs)
    return new_func
old_addHandler = logging.root.addHandler
logging.root.addHandler = tracer(old_addHandler)

# run your code