smooth_logger

A simple logger made primarily for my own personal use. Was made out of a combination of necessity and being so lazy that I overflowed into being productive and instead of searching for a library that suited my needs, I wrote my own.

Installation

smooth_logger can be installed through pip. Either download the latest release from GitHub, or do pip install smooth_logger to install from PyPi. For the latest commits, check the dev branch on the repository.

smooth_logger is currently devloped using Python 3.11, but should work with Python 3.5 and up. A minimum of 3.5 is required due to the project's use of type hinting, which was introduced in that version.

smooth_logger supports Linux, macOS and Windows and will be able to automatically create a folder for storing log files on these operating systems. Other operating systems are not officially supported, but you may still be able to use them by providing a custom config path. See the Initialisation section, below, for more.

Requirements

• smooth_logger uses the plyer library to send desktop notifications.

Usage

Usage of smooth-logger is, as it should be, quite simple.

The Logger model provides a number of methods for your use:

• Logger.add_scope() adds a new scope.
• Logger.clean() erases all log entries currently in memory.
• Logger.edit_scope() modifies the category of an existing scope.
• Logger.get() allows you to retrieve either the most recent log entry or all log entries, optionally filtered by scope.
• Logger.is_scope() can be queried with a scope name to check if the scope exists, and optionally with a category to check if the scope is set to it.
• Logger.notify() sends a desktop notification using the plyer dependency.
• Logger.new() creates and, depending on scope, prints a new log entry.
• Logger.output() saves all log entries of appropriate scope to the log file and cleans the log array for the next group of log entries. A new log file is created for each new day. This method only attempts to create or update the log file if there are entries of an appropriate scope to be written to it; if there are none, it just executes Logger.clean().
• Logger.remove_scope() removes an existing scope.

Initialisation

Here is a simple example showing the initialisation of the logger:

import smooth_logger

Log = smooth_logger.Logger("Example")
Log.new("This is a log message!", "INFO")

In the case above, the logger will automatically create a folder called Example under ~.config on Linux and macOS, or APPDATA\Roaming on Windows, which will contain a subfolder called logs, where the log files will be saved.

You can use the format below to provide a custom location:

Log = smooth_logger.Logger("Example", config_path="~/this/is/an/example")

In this case, logs would be stored under, ~/this/is/an/example/logs.

Scopes

Every log message is associated with a scope. This is an all-caps prefix to the message that should, in a single word, communicate what the message is about. The default scopes available, along with their suggested use cases, are:

• DEBUG: Information for debugging the program.
• ERROR: Errors that the program can recover from but impact functionality or performance.
• FATAL: Errors that mean the program must continue; handled crashes.
• INFO: General information for the user.
• WARNING: Things that have no immediate impact to functionality but could cause errors later on.

You can also forgo passing a scope or pass a None value to indicate that a message should be printed without a prefixed scope. Messages with no scope are printed to the console, not saved to the output file, and are not accompanied by a timestamp.

Categories

When initialising the Logger, you can optionally provide categories to associate with each scope:

• DISABLED (will not print to console or save to log file)
• PRINT (will print to console but not save to log file)
• SAVE (will to log file but not save print to console)
• MAXIMUM (will print to console and save to log file)

By default, the DEBUG scope is disabled, the INFO scope is set to print, and the ERROR, FATAL and WARNING scopes are all set to maximum. Scopes set to save or maximum are not automatically saved to the log file; calling Logger.output() will save them and then clean the in-memory log to avoid duplication.

Categories are accessed like so:

from smooth_logger.enums import Categories

Categories.ENABLED

Customising scopes

You can create custom scopes using the Logger.add_scope() method. These are currently instance-specific and not hard saved in any way. A simple usage of this is as follows:

Log.add_scope("NEWSCOPE", Categories.ENABLED)

Similarly, you can use Logger.edit_scope() to modify the category of an existing scope (for the specific instance only), like so:

Log.edit_scope("DEBUG", Categories.ENABLED)

The above statement could, for example, be used to temporarily enable debug statements if an error is detected.

Only the categories defined in the Categories enum will be recognised; attempting to pass anything else as a category will prompt a warning, and the scope will not be added/edited.

Finally, you can remove any scope with the following method:

Log.remove_scope("DEBUG")

It is recommended to be careful with this method. Removing scopes, like adding or editing them, is ephemeral and won't be hard-saved anywhere, but removing a scope during run-time will produce warnings if you attempt to use that scope anywhere in your program.

Contributing

I'm always happy to accept feature requests, bug reports, and any pull requests to improve the project. If you want to contribute, please explain clearly what your request or issue is so that I can provide solutions as swiftly as possible.