Question

I can’t seem to figure out how to setup a “default” logger for my Django installation. I would like to use Django 1.3’s new LOGGING setting in settings.py.

I’ve looked at the Django Logging Doc’s example, but it looks to me like they only setup handlers which will do logging for particular loggers. In the case of their example they setup handler for the loggers named ‘django’,’django.request’, and ‘myproject.custom’.

All I want to do is setup a default logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler which will handle all loggers by default. i.e., if I make a new module somewhere in my project and it is denoted by something like: my_app_name.my_new_module, I should be able to do this and have all logging goto the rotating file logs.

# In file './my_app_name/my_new_module.py'
import logging
logger = logging.getLogger('my_app_name.my_new_module')
logger.debug('Hello logs!') # <-- This should get logged to my RotatingFileHandler that I setup in `settings.py`!

Answer 1

Figured it out…

You set the ‘catch all’ logger by referencing it with the empty string: ''.

As an example, in the following setup I have the all log events getting saved to logs/mylog.log, with the exception of django.request log events which will be saved to logs/django_request.log. Because 'propagate' is set to False for my django.request logger, the log event will never reach the the ‘catch all’ logger.

LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': True,
    'formatters': {
        'standard': {
            'format': '%(asctime)s [%(levelname)s] %(name)s: %(message)s'
        },
    },
    'handlers': {
        'default': {
            'level':'DEBUG',
            'class':'logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler',
            'filename': 'logs/mylog.log',
            'maxBytes': 1024*1024*5, # 5 MB
            'backupCount': 5,
            'formatter':'standard',
        },  
        'request_handler': {
            'level':'DEBUG',
            'class':'logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler',
            'filename': 'logs/django_request.log',
            'maxBytes': 1024*1024*5, # 5 MB
            'backupCount': 5,
            'formatter':'standard',
        },
    },
    'loggers': {
        '': {
            'handlers': ['default'],
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'propagate': True
        },
        'django.request': {
            'handlers': ['request_handler'],
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'propagate': False
        },
    }
}