Dumping HTTP requests with Flask

Question

I am developing a Flask application based web application ( https://github.com/opensourcehacker/sevabot ) which has HTTP based API services.

Many developers are using and extending the API and I'd like to add a feature which prints Flask's HTTP request to Python logging output, so you can see raw HTTP payloads, source IP and headers you get.

• What hooks Flask offers where this kind of HTTP request dumping would be the easiest to implement

• Are there any existing solutions and best practices to learn from?

Answer 1

Flask makes a standard logger available at at current_app.logger, there's an example configuration in this gist, though you can centralise the logging calls in a before_request handler if you want to log every request:

from flask import request, current_app

@app.before_request
def log_request():
    if current_app.config.get('LOG_REQUESTS'):
        current_app.logger.debug('whatever')
        # Or if you dont want to use a logger, implement
        # whatever system you prefer here
        # print request.headers
        # open(current_app.config['REQUEST_LOG_FILE'], 'w').write('...')