Why is my gunicorn process ignoring the log-level setting with Django?

Question

I have Nginx, Gunicorn, and Django all running on the same Ubuntu EC2 instance. I have a fairly conventional setup and would like to log all gunicorn errors to a particular file.

My configuration for Gunicorn is:

#!/bin/bash

NAME="server"
GUNICORNDIR=/ebs/env/bin
DJANGODIR=/ebs/server/
SOCKFILE=/tmp/gunicorn.sock
LOGFILE=/var/log/gunicorn/gunicorn.error
USER=ubuntu
GROUP=ubuntu
NUM_WORKERS=5
TIMEOUT=60
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=settings
DJANGO_WSGI_MODULE=wsgi

echo "Starting $NAME"

RUNDIR=$(dirname $SOCKFILE)
test -d $RUNDIR || mkdir -p $RUNDIR

exec $GUNICORNDIR/gunicorn ${DJANGO_WSGI_MODULE}:application \
  --name $NAME \
  --workers $NUM_WORKERS \
  --timeout=$TIMEOUT \
  --user=$USER --group=$GROUP \
  --log-level=error --log-file=$LOGFILE \
  --bind=unix:$SOCKFILE

However with this configuration I am getting all logs from DEBUG and above written to the file. My log-level parameter appears to be getting ignored.

What I am looking for is to only have these types of log messages written:

2014-01-02 13:54:53 [3327] [CRITICAL] WORKER TIMEOUT (pid:3338)
2014-01-02 13:54:53 [3327] [CRITICAL] WORKER TIMEOUT (pid:3338)

I thought that the Django logging config specified in my settings.py might be interfering so I added a handler and a logger to try and target gunicorn but that did not work.

'handlers': {
'gunicorn': {
    'level': 'ERROR',
    'class': 'logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler',
    'formatter': 'verbose',
    'filename': '/ebs/log/gunicorn.error',
    'maxBytes': 1024 * 1024 * 100,
},
}
'loggers': {
'gunicorn.errors': {
'level': 'ERROR',
'handlers': ['gunicorn'],
'propagate': False,
},

Here are the versions that I am running

Django 1.5.4 Nginx nginx/1.1.19 Gunicorn 18.0

Any thoughts on what is wrong here?

** Update **

Here is what my django logging config looks like:

LOGGING = {
'version': 1,
'disable_existing_loggers': True,
'root': {
    'level': 'WARNING',
    'handlers': ['sentry'],
},
'formatters': {
    'verbose': {
        'format': '%(levelname)s %(asctime)s %(module)s %(process)d %(thread)d %(message)s'
    },
    'simple': {
        'format': '%(levelname)s %(asctime)s -- %(message)s'
    }
},
'handlers': {
    'sentry': {
        'level': 'ERROR',
        'class': 'raven.contrib.django.raven_compat.handlers.SentryHandler',
    },
    'sentry_file': {
        'level': 'ERROR',
        'class': 'logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler',
        'formatter': 'verbose',
        'filename': '/ebs/log/sentry_log.txt',
        'maxBytes': 1024 * 1024 * 100,  # 100 mb
    },
    'celery': {
        'level': 'DEBUG',
        'class': 'logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler',
        'filename': '/ebs/log/celery/celery.log',
        'formatter': 'verbose',
        'maxBytes': 1024 * 1024 * 100,
    },
    'apps': {
        'level': 'DEBUG',
        'class': 'logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler',
        'formatter': 'verbose',
        'filename': '/ebs/log/apps.log',
        'maxBytes': 1024 * 1024 * 100,
    },
    'apps.dss': {
        'level': 'DEBUG',
        'class': 'logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler',
        'formatter': 'verbose',
        'filename': '/ebs/log/dss_apps.log',
        'maxBytes': 1024 * 1024 * 100,
    },

},
'loggers': {
    'django.db.backends': {
        'level': 'DEBUG',
        'handlers': ['sentry'],
        'propagate': False,
    },
    'sentry': {
        'level': 'DEBUG',
        'handlers': ['sentry'],
        'propagate': False,
    },
    'sentry.errors': {
        'level': 'ERROR',
        'handlers': ['sentry_file', 'sentry'],
        'propagate': False,
    },
    'celery': {
        'level': 'INFO',
        'handlers': ['sentry', 'celery'],
        'propagate': False
    },
    'apps': {
        'level': 'DEBUG',
        'handlers': ['apps', 'sentry'],
        'propagate': False
    },
    'apps.dss' : {
        'level': 'DEBUG',
        'handlers': ['apps.dss', 'sentry'],
        'propagate': False,
    },
},
}

Answer 1

The --log-level setting of gunicorn only affects gunicorns own error logging facility. But the standard error and standard output of your application will also end up in the gunicorn log. I think you might have a StreamHandler somewhere in your Django logging config. StreamHandler logs to stderr by default, so it ends up in your gunicorn log. Remove the StreamHandler or increase the level to fix your problem.