django-db-log2

Logs Django exceptions to your database handler.

(This is a major refactor of django-db-log and is not backwards compatible)

Upgrading

If you use South migrations, simply run:

python manage.py migrate dblog

If you don't use South, then start.

Install

The easiest way to install the package is via pip:

pip install django-db-log2 --upgrade

OR, if you're not quite on the same page (work on that), with setuptools:

easy_install django-db-log2

Once installed, update your settings.py and add dblog to INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'dblog',
    ...
)

Finally, run python manage.py syncdb to create the database tables.

Configuration

Several options exist to configure django-db-log2 via your settings.py:

DBLOG_CATCH_404_ERRORS

Enable catching of 404 errors in the logs. Default value is False:

DBLOG_CATCH_404_ERRORS = True

You can skip other custom exception types by adding a skip_dblog = True attribute to them.

DBLOG_DATABASE_USING

Use a secondary database to store error logs. This is useful if you have several websites and want to aggregate error logs onto one database server:

# This should correspond to a key in your DATABASES setting
DBLOG_DATABASE_USING = 'default'

You should also enable the DBLogRouter to avoid things like extraneous table creation:

DATABASE_ROUTERS = [
        'dblog.routers.DBLogRouter',
        ...
]

Some things to note:

• This functionality REQUIRES Django 1.2.

DBLOG_ENHANCED_TRACEBACKS

Enables showing full embedded (enhanced) tracebacks within the administration for "Messages". These work almost identically to the default exception pages within Django's DEBUG environment:

# Disable embedded interactive tracebacks in the admin
DBLOG_ENHANCED_TRACEBACKS = False

• Note: Even if you disable displaying of enhanced tracebacks, dblog will still store the entire exception stacktrace.

DBLOG_LOGGING

Enabling this setting will turn off automatic database logging within the exception handler, and instead send all exceptions to the named logger dblog. Use this in conjuction with dblog.handlers.DBLogHandler or your own handler to tweak how logging is dealt with.

A good example use case for this, is if you want to write to something like a syslog ahead of time, and later process that into the database with another tool.

Integration with logging

django-db-log supports the ability to directly tie into the logging module. To use it simply add DBLogHandler to your logger:

import logging
from dblog.handlers import DBLogHandler

logging.getLogger().addHandler(DBLogHandler())

# Add StreamHandler to dblog's default so you can catch missed exceptions
logging.getLogger('dblog').addHandler(logging.StreamHandler())

You can also use the exc_info and extra=dict(url=foo) arguments on your log methods. This will store the appropriate information and allow django-db-log to render it based on that information:

logging.error('There was some crazy error', exc_info=sys.exc_info(), extra={'url': request.build_absolute_uri()})

Usage

You will find two new admin panels in the automatically built Django administration:

• Messages (Message)
• Message summaries (GroupedMessage)

It will store every single error inside of the Messages model, and it will store a collective, or summary, of errors inside of Message batches (this is more useful for most cases). If you are using this on multiple sites with the same database, the Messages table also contains the SITE_ID for which it the error appeared on.

If you wish to access these within your own views and models, you may do so via the standard model API:

from dblog.models import Message, GroupedMessage

# Pull the last 10 unresolved errors.
GroupedMessage.objects.filter(status=0).order_by('-last_seen')[0:10]

You can also record errors outside of handler if you want:

from dblog.models import Message

try:
        ...
except Exception, exc:
        Message.objects.create_from_exception(exc, [url=None])

If you wish to log normal messages (useful for non-logging integration):

from dblog.models import Message
import logging

Message.objects.create_from_text('Message Message'[, level=logging.WARNING, url=None])

Both the url and level parameters are optional. level should be one of the following:

• logging.DEBUG
• logging.INFO
• logging.WARNING
• logging.ERROR
• logging.FATAL

If you have a custom exception class, similar to Http404, or something else you don't want to log, you can also add skip_dblog = True to your exception class or instance, and dblog will simply ignore the error.

Notes

• django-db-log will automatically integrate with django-idmapper.
• django-db-log supports South migrations.
• The fact that the admin shows large quantities of results, even if there aren't, is not a bug. This is an efficiency hack on top of Django.