robocorp-log

robocorp-log is a library which provides comprehensible logging for python with a focus on python automation, where detailed information on what happened and why a failure occurs is of vital importance.

Note: The current version is still alpha and it's expected that its internal format and APIs may change.

Why

Although the python logging is flexible it may be hard to analyze the logging afterwards and visually analyze it. Also, the format may end up using a big amount of disk space and it may be tedious to add logging calls to all places of interest.

How

robocorp-log improves those aspects by using a structured format which enables using less disk space while also providing a viewer (log.html) for the generated content.

Also, it provides utilities to setup logging so that logging is done automatically without having to explicitly add calls to add content to the logging (although it's still possible to do so when needed).

Installation

Install with:

pip install robocorp-log

Usage

It's recommended that robocorp-log is used through robocorp-tasks as robocorp-tasks will configure robocorp-log in a streamlined way, where you just need to worry about marking the entry point method with a @tasks decorator and it'll automatically setup the auto-logging and provide the log result in output/log.html.

robocorp-tasks also takes care of customizing robocorp-log through pyproject.toml. See robocorp-tasks for more information.

Although the setup is done through robocorp-tasks, there are still some APIs in robocorp.log which are interesting to use such as:

• Utility methods to add a log message as critical, warn, info, exception (note that it's possible to embed html by passing html=True in those methods, so, things as screenshots can be directly embedded into the log).

• Supressing logging through suppress_variables, suppress_methods, suppress.

• Hiding sensitive data (automatically based on variable or argument names with names registered in add_sensitive_variable_name and add_sensitive_variable_name_pattern) or by passing the value to be hidden to hide_from_output.

Caveats

The auto import mode is done by having a pre-import hook which will change the AST at runtime. This mostly works, but there are a couple of caveats to keep in mind:

1. Debuggers may end up stepping into the robocorp-log code in many places even if such code isn't in the source code (you may want to configure the debugger you're using to skip calls into robocorp.log as that's usually just an implementation detail).

2. The logging needs to be fully setup prior to importing any module that should be automatically logged.

3. async and await are not currently well supported (although it's already in the plans).

Dealing with sensitive data in the logs

• See: Handling Sensitive Data

Internal structure

• Format specification

License: Apache 2.0

Copyright: Robocorp Technologies, Inc.