Configuring Logging Output

You can register “destinations” to handle logging output. A destination is a callable that takes a message dictionary. For example, if we want each message to be encoded in JSON and written on a new line on stdout:

import json, sys
from eliot import add_destination

def stdout(message):
    sys.stdout.write(json.dumps(message) + "\n")
add_destination(stdout)

Outputting to Files

You can create a destination that logs to a file by calling eliot.FileDestination(file=yourfile). Each Eliot message will be encoded in JSON and written on a new line. As a short hand you can call eliot.to_file which will create the destination and then add it. For example:

from eliot import to_file
to_file(open("eliot.log", "ab"))

Note

This destination is blocking: if writing to a file takes a long time your code will not be able to proceed until writing is done. If you’re using Twisted you can wrap a eliot.FileDestination with a non-blocking eliot.logwriter.ThreadedWriter. This allows you to log to a file without blocking the Twisted reactor.

Adding Fields to All Messages

Sometimes you want to add a field to all messages output by your process, regardless of destination. For example if you’re aggregating logs from multiple processes into a central location you might want to include a field process_id that records the name and process id of your process in every log message. Use the eliot.add_global_fields API to do so, e.g.:

import os, sys
from eliot import add_global_fields

add_global_fields(process_id="%s:%d" % (sys.argv[0], os.getpid()))