Does python logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler allow creation of a group writable log file?

Question

I'm using the standard python (2.5.2) logging module, specifically the RotatingFileHandler, on a linux system. My application supports both a command-line interface and a web-service interface. I would like to have both write to the same log file. However, when the log file gets rotated, the new file has 644 permissions and is owned by the web server user which prevents the command-line user from writing to it. Can I specify that new log files should be group-writable in the logging configuration or during logging initialization?

I have looked into the 'mode' setting (r/w/a), but it doesn't seem to support any file permissions.

Answer 1

I resorted to scanning the logging.handlers module and was unable to see any way to specify a different file permissions mode. So, I have a solution now based on extending the RotatingFileHandler as a custom handler. It was fairly painless, once I found some nice references to creating one. The code for the custom handler is below.

class GroupWriteRotatingFileHandler(handlers.RotatingFileHandler):

    def doRollover(self):
        """
        Override base class method to make the new log file group writable.
        """
        # Rotate the file first.
        handlers.RotatingFileHandler.doRollover(self)

        # Add group write to the current permissions.
        currMode = os.stat(self.baseFilename).st_mode
        os.chmod(self.baseFilename, currMode | stat.S_IWGRP)

I also discovered that to reference the custom handler from a logging config file, I had to bind my module to the logging namespace. Simple to do, but annoying.

from mynamespace.logging import custom_handlers
logging.custom_handlers = custom_handlers

References I found useful: binding custom handlers and creating custom handlers

Answer 2

Cory, thanks for the example on binding the custom handler to the logging namespace.