TIL #042 – how to do beautiful console logging

How to do beautiful console logging

The standard way to do logging in Python is by using the module logging that comes in the standard library. To do beautiful console logging with very little effort you just need to use the rich package.

It can be as simple as copying the “setup” code included in the documentation:

import logging
from rich.logging import RichHandler

FORMAT = "%(message)s"
logging.basicConfig(
    level="NOTSET", format=FORMAT, datefmt="[%X]", handlers=[RichHandler()]
)

log = logging.getLogger("rich")
log.info("Hello, World!")

Example of logging with rich and RichHandler

Using the setup code above, I wrote a little script:

import logging
from rich.logging import RichHandler

FORMAT = "%(message)s"
logging.basicConfig(
    level="NOTSET", format=FORMAT, datefmt="[%X]", handlers=[RichHandler()]
)

log = logging.getLogger("rich")

log.info("Logging set up.")

def division(a, b):
    log.debug(f"Dividing {a} by {b}.")
    try:
        return a / b
    except ZeroDivisionError:
        log.exception("Oh noes!")

division(3, 2)
division(5, 0)

If I run this script, here is the output I get:

Your exact colours might be different, but the essence of your output will be just like mine (I wrote an article on how I set up my terminal to use a nice colour scheme):

• on the left, a the timestamp of the message;
• colour-code level messages (these come from logging, but rich colours them);
• the actual log message; and
• the line/file where the log message came from.

All of this at the distance of a copy & paste operation! Isn't this amazing?

This is a very simple example of what you can do with logging + rich. You might want to check their documentations (links in the references) to learn more!

That's it for now! Stay tuned and I'll see you around!

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References

• rich documentation, https://rich.readthedocs.io/en/latest/logging.html [last accessed 27-04-2022];
• Python 3 Documentation, logging, https://docs.python.org/3/library/logging.html [last accessed 27-04-2022];