I found myself putting the same few lines of code at the top of every script or module that I wrote. It went something like this:

import logging
MESSAGE_FORMAT = "%(asctime)s %(levelname)s:: %(message)s"
DATE_FORMAT="%Y.%m.%d %T"
logger = logging.getLogger(self.__name__)
logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)
formatter = logging.Formatter(MESSAGE_FORMAT, DATE_FORMAT)
ch = logging.StreamHandler()
ch.setFormatter(formatter)
logger.addHandler(ch)

Because the default simple logging provided by the standard library logging package doesn't do everything I'd like. I prefer that messages contain the time that they were generated. I prefer that the default logging level is set to INFO. I don't really care to see the log name in each log message.

When I built bigger applications I found myself putting this code in a log.py file and including it with the application source code. Then I wanted to change the log format. Which meant editing quite a few copies of the same file. So I decided that was a bad idea and I would turn my simple few lines of code into a Python module and publish it on PyPi. That way I could include a single copy of the code in each of my modules or applications with a simple pip install command.

The last time I did some serious packaging work this all rather tricky but thanks to the most excellent work of the Python Packaging Authority publishing your own Python module is a breeze these days.

So say hello to simple_log. It's available from PyPI now - https://pypi.python.org/pypi/simple-log/

The documentation is on this site - http://halfcooked.com/code/simple_log/ and the source code lives on BitBucket at https://bitbucket.org/andy47/simplelog

It's designed to be a simple log module that can be incorporated in any Python application and used as simply as:

>>> from simple_log import get_log
>>> log = get_log()
>>> log.info('Information message')
2016.12.12 13:30:30 INFO:: Information message

No more worrying about streams and formatters just a nice simple way to get a log object and log messages from your code. The code is licensed under the MIT license so corrections, additions and praise are always welcome.