structlog 17.1.0

Easier Logging

You can stop writing prose and start thinking in terms of an event that happens in the context of key/value pairs:

>>> from structlog import get_logger
>>> log = get_logger()
>>> log.info("key_value_logging", out_of_the_box=True, effort=0)
2016-04-20 16:20.13 key_value_logging              effort=0 out_of_the_box=True

Each log entry is a meaningful dictionary instead of an opaque string now!

Data Binding

Since log entries are dictionaries, you can start binding and re-binding key/value pairs to your loggers to ensure they are present in every following logging call:

>>> log = log.bind(user="anonymous", some_key=23)
>>> log = log.bind(user="hynek", another_key=42)
>>> log.info("user.logged_in", happy=True)
2016-04-20 16:20.13 user.logged_in                 another_key=42 happy=True some_key=23 user='hynek'

Powerful Pipelines

Each log entry goes through a processor pipeline that is just a chain of functions that receive a dictionary and return a new dictionary that gets fed into the next function. That allows for simple but powerful data manipulation:

def timestamper(logger, log_method, event_dict):
    """Add a timestamp to each log entry."""
    event_dict["timestamp"] = time.time()
    return event_dict

There are plenty of processors for most common tasks coming with structlog:

• Collectors of call stack information (“How did this log entry happen?”),

• …and exceptions (“What happened‽”).

• Unicode encoders/decoders.

• Flexible timestamping.

Formatting

structlog is completely flexible about how the resulting log entry is emitted. Since each log entry is a dictionary, it can be formatted to any format:

• A colorful key/value format for local development,

• JSON for easy parsing,

• or some standard format you have parsers for like nginx or Apache httpd.

Internally, formatters are processors whose return value (usually a string) is passed into loggers that are responsible for the output of your message. structlog comes with multiple useful formatters out of-the-box.

Output

structlog is also very flexible with the final output of your log entries:

• A built-in lightweight printer like in the examples above. Easy to use and fast.

• Use the standard library’s or Twisted’s logging modules for compatibility. In this case structlog works like a wrapper that formats a string and passes them off into existing systems that won’t ever know that structlog even exists. Or the other way round: structlog comes with a logging formatter that allows for processing third party log records.

• Don’t format it to a string at all! structlog passes you a dictionary and you can do with it whatever you want. Reported uses cases are sending them out via network or saving them in a database.

Project Information

structlog is dual-licensed under Apache License, version 2 and MIT, available from PyPI, the source code can be found on GitHub, the documentation at http://www.structlog.org/.

structlog targets Python 2.7, 3.4 and newer, and PyPy.

If you need any help, visit us on #structlog on Freenode!

Release Information

17.1.0 (2017-04-24)

The main features of this release are massive improvements in standard library’s logging integration. Have a look at the updated standard library chapter on how to use them! Special thanks go to Fabian Büchler, Gilbert Gilb’s, Iva Kaneva, insolite, and sky-code, that made them possible.

Authors

structlog is written and maintained by Hynek Schlawack. It’s inspired by previous work done by Jean-Paul Calderone and David Reid.

The development is kindly supported by Variomedia AG.

A full list of contributors can be found on GitHub’s overview. Some of them disapprove of the addition of thread local context data. :)