logging.Logger.debug()

Logger.debug(msg, *args, **kwargs)

Logs a message with level DEBUG on this logger. The msg is the message format string, and the args are the arguments which are merged into msg using the string formatting operator. (Note that this means that you can use keywords in the format string, together with a single dictionary argument.)

There are three keyword arguments in kwargs which are inspected: exc_info, stack_info, and extra.

If exc_info does not evaluate as false, it causes exception information to be added to the logging message. If an exception tuple (in the format returned by sys.exc_info()) or an exception instance is provided, it is used; otherwise, sys.exc_info() is called to get the exception information.

The second optional keyword argument is stack_info, which defaults to False. If true, stack information is added to the logging message, including the actual logging call. Note that this is not the same stack information as that displayed through specifying exc_info: The former is stack frames from the bottom of the stack up to the logging call in the current thread, whereas the latter is information about stack frames which have been unwound, following an exception, while searching for exception handlers.

You can specify stack_info independently of exc_info, e.g. to just show how you got to a certain point in your code, even when no exceptions were raised. The stack frames are printed following a header line which says:

Stack (most recent call last):

This mimics the Traceback (most recent call last): which is used when displaying exception frames.

The third keyword argument is extra which can be used to pass a dictionary which is used to populate the __dict__ of the LogRecord created for the logging event with user-defined attributes. These custom attributes can then be used as you like. For example, they could be incorporated into logged messages. For example:

FORMAT = '%(asctime)-15s %(clientip)s %(user)-8s %(message)s'
logging.basicConfig(format=FORMAT)
d = {'clientip': '192.168.0.1', 'user': 'fbloggs'}
logger = logging.getLogger('tcpserver')
logger.warning('Protocol problem: %s', 'connection reset', extra=d)

would print something like

2006-02-08 22:20:02,165 192.168.0.1 fbloggs  Protocol problem: connection reset

The keys in the dictionary passed in extra should not clash with the keys used by the logging system. (See the Formatter documentation for more information on which keys are used by the logging system.)

If you choose to use these attributes in logged messages, you need to exercise some care. In the above example, for instance, the Formatter has been set up with a format string which expects ‘clientip’ and ‘user’ in the attribute dictionary of the LogRecord. If these are missing, the message will not be logged because a string formatting exception will occur. So in this case, you always need to pass the extra dictionary with these keys.

While this might be annoying, this feature is intended for use in specialized circumstances, such as multi-threaded servers where the same code executes in many contexts, and interesting conditions which arise are dependent on this context (such as remote client IP address and authenticated user name, in the above example). In such circumstances, it is likely that specialized Formatters would be used with particular Handlers.