concise way to change django console log level

Question

I just want to be able to override the console log level in the settings file. I read the django logging document, but I'm having trouble making the logging do what I want. The documentation assures me that:

"From Django 1.5 forward, the project’s logging configuration is merged with Django’s defaults, hence you can decide if you want to add to, or replace the existing configuration. To completely override the default configuration, set the disable_existing_loggers key to True in the LOGGING dictConfig. Alternatively you can redefine some or all of the loggers."

So I tried just adding the following to my settings.py:

LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': False,
    'handlers': {
        'console':{
            'level': 'DEBUG',
        },
    },
}

...but I get an exception:

<snip>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/logging/config.py", line 575, in configure
    '%r: %s' % (name, e))
ValueError: Unable to configure handler 'console': 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'split'

Fair enough. It seems to want the whole configuration block. So I tried what I thought would be the simplest console logger config:

LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': True,
    'formatters': {
        'simple': {
            'format': '%(levelname)s %(message)s'
        },
    },
    'handlers': {
        'console':{
            'level': 'INFO',
            'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
            'formatter': 'simple'
        },
    },
    'loggers': {
        'default': {
            'handlers': ['console'],
            'level': 'INFO',
            'filters': []
        }
    }
}

My intention is to set the log-level to INFO, but I still see a bunch of DEBUG messages, and the string MYFORMATTER doesn't appear in any of them anyway.

Finally, with blind optimism, I attempted this:

from django.utils.log import DEFAULT_LOGGING
DEFAULT_LOGGING['handlers']['console']['level'] = 'INFO'

I must be missing something quite obvious here.

BTW, I'm using Django 1.5.1.

Answer 1

Answering my own question here, I ended up going with the following in the settings.py file:

import logging

logging.basicConfig(
    level = logging.INFO,
    format = " %(levelname)s %(name)s: %(message)s",
)