How to configure logging to syslog in python?

Question

I can't get my head around Python's logging module. My needs are very simple: I just want to log everything to syslog. After reading documentation I came up with this simple test script:

import logging
import logging.handlers

my_logger = logging.getLogger('MyLogger')
my_logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

handler = logging.handlers.SysLogHandler()

my_logger.addHandler(handler)

my_logger.debug('this is debug')
my_logger.critical('this is critical')

But this script does not produce any log records in syslog. What's wrong?

Answer 1

Is your syslog.conf set up to handle facility=user?

You can set the facility used by the python logger with the facility argument, something like this:

handler = logging.handlers.SysLogHandler(facility=LOG_DAEMON)

Answer 2

Change the line to this:

handler = SysLogHandler(address='/dev/log')

This works for me

import logging
import logging.handlers

my_logger = logging.getLogger('MyLogger')
my_logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

handler = logging.handlers.SysLogHandler(address = '/dev/log')

my_logger.addHandler(handler)

my_logger.debug('this is debug')
my_logger.critical('this is critical')