Question

I have a Django app on a Linux server. In one of the views, some form of print command is executed, and some string gets printed. How can I find out what the printed string was? Is there some log in which these things are kept?

Answer 1

The output should be in the terminal, where django was started. (if you don’t started it directly, I don’t believe there’s a way to read it)

As linkedlinked pointed out, it’s the best to not use print, because this can cause Exceptions! But that’s not the only reason: There are modules (like logging) made for such purposes and they have a lot more options.

This site (even when it’s from 2008) confirm my statements:

If you want to know what’s going on inside a view, the quickest way is to drop in a print statement. The development server outputs any print statements directly to the terminal; it’s the server-side alternative to a JavaScript alert().

If you want to be a bit more sophisticated with your logging, it’s worth turning to Python’s logging module (part of the standard library). You can configure it in your settings.py: here he describes, what to do (look on the site)

For debugging-purposes you could also enable the debug-mode or use the django-debug-toolbar.

Hope it helps! 🙂