Why is Flask application not creating any logs when hosted by Gunicorn?

Question

I'm trying to add logging to a web application which uses Flask.

When hosted using the built-in server (i.e. python3 server.py), logging works. When hosted using Gunicorn, the log file is not created.

The simplest code which reproduces the problem is this one:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import logging
from flask import Flask
flaskApp = Flask(__name__)


@flaskApp.route('/')
def index():
    flaskApp.logger.info('Log message')
    print('Direct output')
    return 'Hello World\n'


if __name__ == "__main__":
    logHandler = logging.FileHandler('/var/log/demo/app.log')
    logHandler.setLevel(logging.INFO)
    flaskApp.logger.addHandler(logHandler)
    flaskApp.logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)
    flaskApp.run()

The application is called using:

gunicorn server:flaskApp -b :80 -w 4
    --access-gfile /var/log/demo/access.log
    --error-logfile /var/log/demo/error.log

When doing a request to the home page of the site, the following happens:

1. I receive the expected HTTP 200 "Hello World\n" in response.

2. There is a trace of the request in /var/log/demo/access.log.

3. /var/log/demo/error.log stays the same (there are just the boot events).

4. There is the "Direct output" line in the terminal.

5. There is no '/var/log/demo/app.log'. If I create the file prior to launching the application, the file is not modified.

Note that:

• The directory /var/log/demo can be accessed (read, write, execute) by everyone, so this is not the permissions issue.

• If I add StreamHandler as a second handler, there is still no trace of the "Log message" message neither in the terminal, nor in Gunicorn log files.

• Gunicorn is installed using pip3 install gunicorn, so there shouldn't be any mismatch with Python versions.

What's happening?

Answer 1

When you use python3 server.py you are running the server3.py script.

When you use gunicorn server:flaskApp ... you are running the gunicorn startup script which then imports the module server and looks for the variable flaskApp in that module.

Since server.py is being imported the __name__ var will contain "server", not "__main__" and therefore you log handler setup code is not being run.

You could simply move the log handler setup code outside of the if __name__ == "__main__": stanza. But ensure that you keep flaskApp.run() in there since you do not want that to be run when gunicorn imports server.

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