Creating a basic log

There are two necessary steps to logging:

• Get a logging.Logger instance with the logging.getLogger() function.

• Create messages with that Logger. There are a number of methods with names such as warn(), info(), debug(), error(), and fatal() that create messages with different levels of importance.

These two steps are not sufficient to give us any output, however. There's a third step that we take only when we need to see the output. Some logging is for debugging purposes, and seeing a log isn't always required. The optional step is to configure the logging module's handlers, filters, and formatters. We can use the logging.basicConfig() function for this.

It's technically possibly to even skip the first step. We can use the default logger that's part of the logging module's top-level functions. We showed you this in Chapter 8, Decorators and Mixins – Cross-cutting Aspects, because the focus was on decoration, not logging. We advise you against using the default root logger...