django-shoogie 0.6b

Key Features

• Simple, server-error specific logging

• Logs django’s familiar technical 500 response

• Uses django’s standard admin interface

• Easy retrieval by user, exception, file, function

• Easy extraction of users’ email addresses

• Middleware can easily be placed outside transaction management

• Configurable exception ignores

• Configurable traceback filtering

Installation

To install shoogie:

pip install django-shoogie

To use shoogie in a django project, add it to the INSTALLED_APPS and add the shoogie middleware to MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES in your settings.py. Be sure to put the middleware above the transaction middleware, or errors which cause the DB transaction to be rolled back will not be logged. The django.contrib.admin app must also be installed to view the errors logged via django’s admin interface:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
        'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
        'shoogie.middleware.ExceptionLoggingMiddleware',        # <---
        'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
        'django.middleware.transaction.TransactionMiddleware',
        'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
        'django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware',
        'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
        # ...
    )

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.admindocs',
    'shoogie',                      # <---
    # ...
)

Make sure to run syncdb after adding shoogie to create the shoogie_servererror table.

Configuration

Shoogie can be configured with the following settings:

SHOOGIE_IGNORE_EXCEPTIONS = (
    'django.http.Http404',
    'django.exceptions.PermissionDenied',
)

SHOOGIE_TRACEBACK_EXCLUDE = (
    ('/django/core/handlers/base.py$', '^get_response$'),
    ('/django/template/', 'render'),
)

Use

Errors logged by shoogie can be viewed via django’s admin interface at /admin/shoogie/servererror/.

To view the data fields stored in the log entry, click in the first column.

To visit the url in which the error occurred, click the ‘path’ column. This won’t work if the host is inaccessible, if the request method was something other than GET, or if the path isn’t really an HTTP request path (see below).

If a user is logged with an entry, a link to the admin detail page for the user will be displayed in the admin list.

Click the ‘debug’ link to view the django-generated ‘technical response’ (debug page) for the exception.

To get a list of users and email addresses who encountered a set of errors, select the log entries using the checkboxes on the left, then select “Get user email addresses for selected errors” from the ‘Action’ drop-down menu and click the ‘Go’ button.

To mark a set of errors as resolved or as not resolved, select the entries in question and pick the appropriate action from the drop-down as above.

API

Shoogie can also be used to log exceptions directly. This could be useful for exceptions occurring in back-end processes such as long-running calculations, cron-jobs, and celery workers:

from shoogie import logger
logger.log_exception([request, [exc_type, exc_val, tb]])

Logs an exception to the db. If exc_type, exc_val, and tb aren’t supplied, they will be retrieved using sys.exc_info(). The django technical debug page stored will display the traceback as with errors occuring in normal views.

If request is given, whatever request information is present will also be saved in the log entry. request should be an object which implements, partially or wholly, the same interface as a django.http.HttpRequest.

As a convenience for logging exceptions outside the context of an HTTP request, log_exception can be passed a string instead, which will be logged as the request path. Make sure the logging is done outside any transaction which might be reversed by the exception being logged. A general pattern as follows is recommended:

try:
    with transaction.commit_on_success():
        "insert your processing here"
except:
    logger.log_exception('Description')

Related Projects

django-sentry is a large, very full-featured multi-platform error logging server, which is based on django, and which offers prepackaged integration with many other platforms. It offers some advanced features including aggregation of similar exceptions, graphs, a fully web-2.0 real-time AJAX interface, and much more.

raven is the python logging client for django-sentry.

django-erroneous is a very simple logging system, similar in scope to django-shoogie. It uses django signals rather than middleware to capture exceptions.

django-logdb provides a handler for python’s logging module which stores log messages in the db. It includes middleware for exception logging. It also provides aggregation and some of the features offered by django-setry.