The verboselogs package extends Python's logging module to add the log levels VERBOSE and SPAM:

• The VERBOSE level sits between the predefined INFO and DEBUG levels.
• The SPAM level sits between the predefined DEBUG and NOTSET levels.

The code to do this is simple and short, but I still don't want to copy/paste it to every project I'm working on, hence this package. It's currently tested on Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.4, 3.5 and PyPy.

The verboselogs package is available on PyPI which means installation should be as simple as:

$ pip install verboselogs

There's actually a multitude of ways to install Python packages (e.g. the per user site-packages directory, virtual environments or just installing system wide) and I have no intention of getting into that discussion here, so if this intimidates you then read up on your options before returning to these instructions ;-).

It's very simple to start using the verboselogs package:

>>> import logging, verboselogs >>> logger = verboselogs.VerboseLogger('verbose-demo') >>> logger.addHandler(logging.StreamHandler()) >>> logger.setLevel(logging.VERBOSE) >>> logger.verbose("Can we have verbose logging? %s", "Yes we can!")

Here's a skeleton of a very simple Python program with a command line interface and configurable logging:

"""
Usage: demo.py [OPTIONS]

This is the usage message of demo.py. Usually
this text explains how to use the program.

Supported options:
  -v, --verbose  make more noise
  -h, --help     show this message and exit
"""

import getopt
import logging
import sys
import verboselogs

logger = verboselogs.VerboseLogger('demo')
logger.addHandler(logging.StreamHandler())
logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)

# Command line option defaults.
verbosity = 0

# Parse command line options.
opts, args = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], 'vqh', ['verbose', 'quiet', 'help'])

# Map command line options to variables.
for option, argument in opts:
    if option in ('-v', '--verbose'):
        verbosity += 1
    elif option in ('-q', '--quiet'):
        verbosity -= 1
    elif option in ('-h', '--help'):
        print __doc__.strip()
        sys.exit(0)
    else:
        assert False, "Unhandled option!"

# Configure logger for requested verbosity.
if verbosity >= 3:
    logger.setLevel(logging.SPAM)
elif verbosity >= 2:
    logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
elif verbosity >= 1:
    logger.setLevel(logging.VERBOSE)
elif verbosity < 0:
    logger.setLevel(logging.WARNING)

# Your code goes here.
...

If you want to set VerboseLogger as the default logging class for all subsequent logger instances, you can do so using verboselogs.install():

import logging
import verboselogs

verboselogs.install()
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__) # will be a VerboseLogger instance

If using the above verboselogs.install() approach, Pylint is not smart enough to recognize that logging is using verboselogs, resulting in errors like:

E:285,24: Module 'logging' has no 'VERBOSE' member (no-member)
E:375,12: Instance of 'RootLogger' has no 'verbose' member (no-member)

To fix this, verboselogs provides a Pylint plugin verboselogs.pylint which, when loaded with pylint --load-plugins verboselogs.pylint, adds the verboselogs methods and constants to Pylint's understanding of the logging module.

The table below shows the names, numeric values and descriptions of the predefined log levels and the VERBOSE and SPAM levels defined by this package, plus some notes that I added.

The latest version of verboselogs is available on PyPI and GitHub. The documentation is hosted on Read the Docs. For bug reports please create an issue on GitHub. If you have questions, suggestions, etc. feel free to send me an e-mail at peter@peterodding.com.

This software is licensed under the MIT license.

© 2016 Peter Odding.