Why is Flask application not creating any logs when hosted by Gunicorn?

Question

I'm trying to add logging to a web application which uses Flask.

When hosted using the built-in server (i.e. python3 server.py), logging works. When hosted using Gunicorn, the log file is not created.

The simplest code which reproduces the problem is this one:

#!/usr/bin/env python  import logging from flask import Flask flaskApp = Flask(__name__)   @flaskApp.route('/') def index():     flaskApp.logger.info('Log message')     print('Direct output')     return 'Hello World\n'   if __name__ == "__main__":     logHandler = logging.FileHandler('/var/log/demo/app.log')     logHandler.setLevel(logging.INFO)     flaskApp.logger.addHandler(logHandler)     flaskApp.logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)     flaskApp.run() 

The application is called using:

gunicorn server:flaskApp -b :80 -w 4     --access-gfile /var/log/demo/access.log     --error-logfile /var/log/demo/error.log 

When doing a request to the home page of the site, the following happens:

1. I receive the expected HTTP 200 "Hello World\n" in response.

2. There is a trace of the request in /var/log/demo/access.log.

3. /var/log/demo/error.log stays the same (there are just the boot events).

4. There is the "Direct output" line in the terminal.

5. There is no '/var/log/demo/app.log'. If I create the file prior to launching the application, the file is not modified.

Note that:

• The directory /var/log/demo can be accessed (read, write, execute) by everyone, so this is not the permissions issue.

• If I add StreamHandler as a second handler, there is still no trace of the "Log message" message neither in the terminal, nor in Gunicorn log files.

• Gunicorn is installed using pip3 install gunicorn, so there shouldn't be any mismatch with Python versions.

What's happening?

Answer 1

This approach works for me: Import the Python logging module and add gunicorn's error handlers to it. Then your logger will log into the gunicorn error log file:

import logging  app = Flask(__name__)  gunicorn_error_logger = logging.getLogger('gunicorn.error') app.logger.handlers.extend(gunicorn_error_logger.handlers) app.logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG) app.logger.debug('this will show in the log') 

My Gunicorn startup script is configured to output log entries to a file like so:

gunicorn main:app \     --workers 4 \     --bind 0.0.0.0:9000 \     --log-file /app/logs/gunicorn.log \     --log-level DEBUG \     --reload 

Answer 2

When you use python3 server.py you are running the server3.py script.

When you use gunicorn server:flaskApp ... you are running the gunicorn startup script which then imports the module server and looks for the variable flaskApp in that module.

Since server.py is being imported the __name__ var will contain "server", not "__main__" and therefore you log handler setup code is not being run.

You could simply move the log handler setup code outside of the if __name__ == "__main__": stanza. But ensure that you keep flaskApp.run() in there since you do not want that to be run when gunicorn imports server.

More about what does if __name__ == “__main__”: do?