Basic logging

One of the first requirements of a console software is for it to log what it does, that is, what's happened, and any warnings or errors. Especially when we are talking about long-term software or daemons running in the background.

Sadly, if you've ever tried to use the Python logging module, you've probably noticed that you can't get any output apart from errors.

That's because the default enabled level is WARNING, so that only warnings and worse are tracked. Little tweaks are needed to make logging generally available.

How to do it...

For this recipe, the steps are as follows:

1. The logging module allows us to easily set up the logging configuration through the basicConfig method:

>>> import logging, sys
>>> 
>>> logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO, stream=sys.stderr,
...                     format='%(asctime)s %(name)s %(levelname)s: %(message)s')
>>> log = logging.getLogger(__name__)

2. Now that our logger is properly configured, we can try using...