Eliot logging library is now open source!

by Zaheer
in Programming
on March 13, 2023

I am happy to announce that Eliot, a logging library for Python, is now available as an open source project. In previous posts (now part of the documentation) I talked about the motivation behind Eliot: logging as storytelling. Log messages in Eliot are a forest of nested actions. Actions start and eventually finish, successfully or not. Log messages thus tell a story: what happened and what caused it.

Here’s what your logs might look like before using Eliot:

Going to validate http://example.com/index.html.
Started download attempted.
Download succeeded!
Missing <title> element in "/html/body".
Bad HTML entity in "/html/body/p[2]".
2 validation errors found!

After switching to Eliot you’ll get a tree of messages with both message contents and causal relationships encoded in a structured format:

{"action_type": "validate_page", "action_status": "started", "url": "http://example.com/index.html"}
    {"action_type": "download", "action_status": "started"}
    {"action_type": "download", "action_status": "succeeded"}
    {"action_type": "validate_html", "action_status": "started"}
        {"message_type": "validation_error", "error_type": "missing_title", "xpath": "/html/head"}
        {"message_type": "validation_error", "error_type": "bad_entity", "xpath": "/html/body/p[2]"}
    {"action_type": "validate_html", "action_status": "failed", "exception": "validator.ValidationFailed"}
{"action_type": "validate_page", "action_status": "failed", "exception": "validator.ValidationFailed"}

To install: