Standard Library Logging

Ideally, structlog should be able to be used as a drop-in replacement for standard library’s logging by wrapping it. In other words, you should be able to replace your call to logging.getLogger() by a call to structlog.get_logger() and things should keep working as before (if structlog is configured right, see Suggested Configurations below).

If you run into incompatibilities, it is a bug so please take the time to report it! If you’re a heavy logging user, your help to ensure a better compatibility would be highly appreciated!

Concrete Bound Logger

To make structlog‘s behavior less magicy, it ships with a standard library-specific wrapper class that has an explicit API instead of improvising: structlog.stdlib.BoundLogger. It behaves exactly like the generic structlog.BoundLogger except:

  • it’s slightly faster due to less overhead,
  • has an explicit API that mirrors the log methods of standard library’s logging.Logger,
  • hence causing less cryptic error messages if you get method names wrong.

Processors

structlog comes with a few standard library-specific processors:

render_to_log_kwargs():
Renders the event dictionary into keyword arguments for logging.log() that attaches everything except the event field to the extra argument. This is useful if you want to render your log entries entirely within logging.
filter_by_level():
Checks the log entry’s log level against the configuration of standard library’s logging. Log entries below the threshold get silently dropped. Put it at the beginning of your processing chain to avoid expensive operations happen in the first place.
add_logger_name():
Adds the name of the logger to the event dictionary under the key logger.
add_log_level():
Adds the log level to the event dictionary under the key level.
PositionalArgumentsFormatter:
This processes and formats positional arguments (if any) passed to log methods in the same way the logging module would do, e.g. logger.info("Hello, %s", name).

structlog also comes with ProcessorFormatter which is a logging.Formatter that enables you to format non-structlog log entries using structlog renderers and multiplex structlog’s output with different renderers (see below for an example).

Suggested Configurations

Depending where you’d like to do your formatting, you can take one of three approaches:

Rendering Using logging-based Formatters

import structlog

structlog.configure(
    processors=[
        structlog.stdlib.filter_by_level,
        structlog.stdlib.add_logger_name,
        structlog.stdlib.add_log_level,
        structlog.stdlib.PositionalArgumentsFormatter(),
        structlog.processors.StackInfoRenderer(),
        structlog.processors.format_exc_info,
        structlog.processors.UnicodeDecoder(),
        structlog.stdlib.render_to_log_kwargs,
    ],
    context_class=dict,
    logger_factory=structlog.stdlib.LoggerFactory(),
    wrapper_class=structlog.stdlib.BoundLogger,
    cache_logger_on_first_use=True,
)

Now you have the event dict available within each log record. If you want all your log entries (i.e. also those not from your app/structlog) to be formatted as JSON, you can use the python-json-logger library:

import logging
import sys

from pythonjsonlogger import jsonlogger

handler = logging.StreamHandler(sys.stdout)
handler.setFormatter(jsonlogger.JsonFormatter())
root_logger = logging.getLogger()
root_logger.addHandler(handler)

Now both structlog and logging will emit JSON logs:

>>> structlog.get_logger("test").warning("hello")
{"message": "hello", "logger": "test", "level": "warning"}

>>> logging.getLogger("test").warning("hello")
{"message": "hello"}

Rendering Using structlog-based Formatters Within logging

You can leave rendering for later and yet use structlog’s renderers for it:

import logging.config
import structlog

timestamper = structlog.processors.TimeStamper(fmt="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
pre_chain = [
    # Add the log level and a timestamp to the event_dict if the log entry
    # is not from structlog.
    structlog.stdlib.add_log_level,
    timestamper,
]

logging.config.dictConfig({
        "version": 1,
        "disable_existing_loggers": False,
        "formatters": {
            "plain": {
                "()": structlog.stdlib.ProcessorFormatter,
                "processor": structlog.dev.ConsoleRenderer(colors=False),
                "foreign_pre_chain": pre_chain,
            },
            "colored": {
                "()": structlog.stdlib.ProcessorFormatter,
                "processor": structlog.dev.ConsoleRenderer(colors=True),
                "foreign_pre_chain": pre_chain,
            },
        },
        "handlers": {
            "default": {
                "level": "DEBUG",
                "class": "logging.StreamHandler",
                "formatter": "colored",
            },
            "file": {
                "level": "DEBUG",
                "class": "logging.handlers.WatchedFileHandler",
                "filename": "test.log",
                "formatter": "plain",
            },
        },
        "loggers": {
            "": {
                "handlers": ["default", "file"],
                "level": "DEBUG",
                "propagate": True,
            },
        }
})
structlog.configure(
    processors=[
        structlog.stdlib.add_log_level,
        structlog.stdlib.PositionalArgumentsFormatter(),
        timestamper,
        structlog.processors.StackInfoRenderer(),
        structlog.processors.format_exc_info,
        structlog.stdlib.ProcessorFormatter.wrap_for_formatter,
    ],
    context_class=dict,
    logger_factory=structlog.stdlib.LoggerFactory(),
    wrapper_class=structlog.stdlib.BoundLogger,
    cache_logger_on_first_use=True,
)

This defines two formatters: one plain and one colored. Both are run for each log entry. Log entries that do not originate from structlog, are additionally pre-processed using a cached timestamper and add_log_level().

>>> logging.getLogger().warning("bar")
2017-03-06 11:49:27 [warning  ] bar

>>> structlog.get_logger("structlog").warning("foo", x=42)
2017-03-06 11:49:32 [warning  ] foo                            x=42

>>> print(open("test.log").read())
2017-03-06 11:49:27 [warning  ] bar
2017-03-06 11:49:32 [warning  ] foo                            x=42

(sadly, you have to imagine the colors in the first two outputs)

If you leave foreign_pre_chain None, formatting will be left to logging. Meaning: you can define a format for ProcessorFormatter too!

Rendering Within structlog

A basic configuration to output structured logs in JSON format looks like this:

import structlog

structlog.configure(
    processors=[
        structlog.stdlib.filter_by_level,
        structlog.stdlib.add_logger_name,
        structlog.stdlib.add_log_level,
        structlog.stdlib.PositionalArgumentsFormatter(),
        structlog.processors.TimeStamper(fmt="iso"),
        structlog.processors.StackInfoRenderer(),
        structlog.processors.format_exc_info,
        structlog.processors.UnicodeDecoder(),
        structlog.processors.JSONRenderer()
    ],
    context_class=dict,
    logger_factory=structlog.stdlib.LoggerFactory(),
    wrapper_class=structlog.stdlib.BoundLogger,
    cache_logger_on_first_use=True,
)

(if you’re still runnning Python 2, replace UnicodeDecoder through UnicodeEncoder)

To make your program behave like a proper 12 factor app that outputs only JSON to stdout, configure the logging module like this:

import logging
import sys

logging.basicConfig(
    format="%(message)s",
    stream=sys.stdout,
    level=logging.INFO,
)

In this case only your own logs are formatted as JSON:

>>> structlog.get_logger("test").warning("hello")
{"event": "hello", "logger": "test", "level": "warning", "timestamp": "2017-03-06T07:39:09.518720Z"}

>>> logging.getLogger("test").warning("hello")
hello