Python logging - check location of log files?

To find the logfile location, try instantiating your log object in a Python shell in your environment and looking at the value of:

log.handlers[0].stream


The logging module uses handlers attached to loggers to decide how, where, or even if messages ultimately get stored or displayed. You can configure logging by default to write to a file as well. You should really read the docs, but if you call logging.basicConfig(filename=log_file_name) where log_file_name is the name of the file you want messages written to (note that you have to do this before anything else in logging is called at all), then all messages logged to all loggers (unless some further reconfiguration happens later) will be written there. Be aware of what level the logger is set to though; if memory serves, info is below the default log level, so you'd have to include level=logging.INFO in the arguments to basicConfig as well for your message to end up in the file.

As to the other part of your question, logging.getLogger(some_string) returns a Logger object, inserted in to the correct position in the hierarchy from the root logger, with the name being the value of some_string. Called with no arguments, it returns the root logger. __name__ returns the name of the current module, so logging.getLogger(__name__) returns a Logger object with the name set to the name of the current module. This is a common pattern used with logging, as it causes the logger structure to mirror your code's module structure, which often makes logging messages much more useful when debugging.


Some good answers on this, but top answer didn't work for me because I was using a different type of file handler, and the handler.stream doesn't provide the path, but file handle, and getting the path out of that is somewhat non-obvious. Here's my solution:

import logging
from logging import FileHandler

# note, this will create a new logger if the name doesn't exist, 
# which will have no handlers attached (yet)
logger = logging.getLogger('<name>')

for h in logger.handlers:
    # check the handler is a file handler 
    # (rotating handler etc. inherit from this, so it will still work)
    # stream handlers write to stderr, so their filename is not useful to us
    if isinstance(h, FileHandler):
        # h.stream should be an open file handle, it's name is the path
        print(h.stream.name)

To get the log location of a simple file logger, try

logging.getLoggerClass().root.handlers[0].baseFilename