I am using a simple unit test based test runner to test my Django application.
My application itself is configured to use a basic logger in settings.py using:
<
Is there a simple way to turn off logging in a global way, so that the application specific loggers aren't writing stuff out to the console when I run tests?
The other answers prevent "writing stuff out to the console" by globally setting the logging infrastructure to ignore anything. This works but I find it too blunt an approach. My approach is to perform a configuration change which does only what's needed to prevent logs to get out on the console. So I add a custom logging filter to my settings.py
:
from logging import Filter
class NotInTestingFilter(Filter):
def filter(self, record):
# Although I normally just put this class in the settings.py
# file, I have my reasons to load settings here. In many
# cases, you could skip the import and just read the setting
# from the local symbol space.
from django.conf import settings
# TESTING_MODE is some settings variable that tells my code
# whether the code is running in a testing environment or
# not. Any test runner I use will load the Django code in a
# way that makes it True.
return not settings.TESTING_MODE
And I configure the Django logging to use the filter:
LOGGING = {
'version': 1,
'disable_existing_loggers': False,
'filters': {
'testing': {
'()': NotInTestingFilter
}
},
'formatters': {
'verbose': {
'format': ('%(levelname)s %(asctime)s %(module)s '
'%(process)d %(thread)d %(message)s')
},
},
'handlers': {
'console': {
'level': 'DEBUG',
'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
'filters': ['testing'],
'formatter': 'verbose'
},
},
'loggers': {
'foo': {
'handlers': ['console'],
'level': 'DEBUG',
'propagate': True,
},
}
}
End result: when I'm testing, nothing goes to the console, but everything else stays the same.
I design code that contains logging instructions that are triggered only in specific circumstances and that should output the exact data I need for diagnosis if things go wrong. Therefore I test that they do what they are supposed to do and thus completely disabling logging is not viable for me. I don't want to find once the software is in production that what I thought would be logged is not logged.
Moreover, some test runners (Nose, for instance) will capture logs during testing and output the relevant part of the log together with a test failure. It is useful in figuring out why a test failed. If logging is completely turned off, then there's nothing that can be captured.