35.15. syslog — Unix syslog library routines

Platforms: Unix

This module provides an interface to the Unix syslog library routines. Refer to the Unix manual pages for a detailed description of the syslog facility.

This module wraps the system syslog family of routines. A pure Python library that can speak to a syslog server is available in the logging.handlers module as SysLogHandler.

The module defines the following functions:

syslog.syslog([priority], message)

Send the string message to the system logger. A trailing newline is added if necessary. Each message is tagged with a priority composed of a facility and a level. The optional priority argument, which defaults to LOG_INFO, determines the message priority. If the facility is not encoded in priority using logical-or (LOG_INFO | LOG_USER), the value given in the openlog() call is used.

If openlog() has not been called prior to the call to syslog(), openlog() will be called with no arguments.

syslog.openlog([ident[, logoption[, facility]]])

Logging options of subsequent syslog() calls can be set by calling openlog(). syslog() will call openlog() with no arguments if the log is not currently open.

The optional ident keyword argument is a string which is prepended to every message, and defaults to sys.argv[0] with leading path components stripped. The optional logoption keyword argument (default is 0) is a bit field – see below for possible values to combine. The optional facility keyword argument (default is LOG_USER) sets the default facility for messages which do not have a facility explicitly encoded.

syslog.closelog()

Reset the syslog module values and call the system library closelog().

This causes the module to behave as it does when initially imported. For example, openlog() will be called on the first syslog() call (if openlog() hasn’t already been called), and ident and other openlog() parameters are reset to defaults.

syslog.setlogmask(maskpri)

Set the priority mask to maskpri and return the previous mask value. Calls to syslog() with a priority level not set in maskpri are ignored. The default is to log all priorities. The function LOG_MASK(pri) calculates the mask for the individual priority pri. The function LOG_UPTO(pri) calculates the mask for all priorities up to and including pri.

The module defines the following constants:

Priority levels (high to low):

LOG_EMERG, LOG_ALERT, LOG_CRIT, LOG_ERR, LOG_WARNING, LOG_NOTICE, LOG_INFO, LOG_DEBUG.

Facilities:

LOG_KERN, LOG_USER, LOG_MAIL, LOG_DAEMON, LOG_AUTH, LOG_LPR, LOG_NEWS, LOG_UUCP, LOG_CRON, LOG_SYSLOG and LOG_LOCAL0 to LOG_LOCAL7.

Log options:

LOG_PID, LOG_CONS, LOG_NDELAY, LOG_NOWAIT and LOG_PERROR if defined in <syslog.h>.

35.15.1. Examples

35.15.1.1. Simple example

A simple set of examples:

import syslog

syslog.syslog('Processing started')
if error:
    syslog.syslog(syslog.LOG_ERR, 'Processing started')

An example of setting some log options, these would include the process ID in logged messages, and write the messages to the destination facility used for mail logging:

syslog.openlog(logoption=syslog.LOG_PID, facility=syslog.LOG_MAIL)
syslog.syslog('E-mail processing initiated...')