Heroku logs for Django projects missing errors

Question

I'm running a simple Django project on Heroku. It works, but if I get a server error it doesn't give me any details in the logs. This makes errors incredibly hard to deal with.

Now I've set up a staging server and it has the same problem - the pages are failing and I don't get any feedback as to why.

$ heroku logs

...

2012-08-08T13:55:58+00:00 app[web.1]: Development server is running at http://0.0.0.0:59048/
2012-08-08T13:55:59+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to up
2012-08-08T13:56:01+00:00 heroku[router]: GET [xxx].herokuapp.com/ dyno=web.1 queue=0 wait=0ms service=22ms status=500 bytes=27
2012-08-08T13:56:01+00:00 app[web.1]: [08/Aug/2012 14:56:01] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 500 27
2012-08-08T13:56:02+00:00 heroku[router]: GET [xxx].herokuapp.com/favicon.ico dyno=web.1 queue=0 wait=0ms service=6ms status=500 bytes=27
2012-08-08T13:56:09+00:00 heroku[router]: GET[xxx].herokuapp.com/admin dyno=web.1 queue=0 wait=0ms service=2ms status=301 bytes=0
2012-08-08T13:56:09+00:00 app[web.1]: [08/Aug/2012 14:56:09] "GET /admin HTTP/1.1" 301 0
2012-08-08T13:56:10+00:00 heroku[router]: GET [xxx].herokuapp.com/admin/ dyno=web.1 queue=0 wait=0ms service=224ms status=500 bytes=27
2012-08-08T13:56:10+00:00 app[web.1]: [08/Aug/2012 14:56:10] "GET /admin/ HTTP/1.1" 500 27
2012-08-08T13:56:10+00:00 heroku[router]: GET [xxx].herokuapp.com/favicon.ico dyno=web.1 queue=0 wait=0ms service=6ms status=500 bytes=27

As you can see, pages are returning as 500, but I'm not getting any stack trace information or similar.

Possible problems could be indicated by: 'Development server is running at...' - what does this mean and is it affecting error logging?

Also, I'm using a '500.html' template file to define a custom 500 error page. Could this be hiding errors somehow? It really shouldn't.

Or do I need to be looking in another place for logs with Django on Heroku?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Looks like it was simply a problem caused by an expectation that Django under Heroku would work like Rails. Silly me.

For anyone else suffering this problem when moving from one framework/language to another:

• When debug is off, Django uses the standard Python logger to handle errors in the code.
• There is a default set-up at the bottom of settings.py which emails the site admins when there are errors. Nice. It needs an array of email addresses in the ADMINS variable in settings.py to work.

• Errors are sent, by default, to STDERR instead of STDOUT, so they won't show in the logs. This can be changed apparently. Try here if you want this behaviour:

  http://codeinthehole.com/writing/console-logging-to-stdout-in-django/