duplicate output in simple python logging configuration

Question

I'm setting up python logging as follows:

def setup_logging():
    loggers = (logging.getLogger("amcat"), logging.getLogger("scrapers"),logging.getLogger(__name__))
    filename = "somefile.txt"
    sys.stderr = open(filename, 'a')
    handlers = (logging.StreamHandler(sys.stdout),logging.FileHandler(filename))
    formatter = AmcatFormatter(date = True)

    for handler in handlers:
        handler.setLevel(logging.INFO)
        handler.setFormatter(formatter)

    for logger in loggers:
        logger.propagate = False
        logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)
        for handler in handlers:        
            logger.addHandler(handler)
    logging.getLogger().handlers = []

2 major module loggers are enabled, they're both supposed to log to the console aswell as a file. errors are redirected to the file (ideally, errors would show in the console as well but i've yet to implement this)

Right after, i check whether things are right:

should_work = [
    "amcat.scraping.scraper",
    "amcat.scraping.htmltools",
    "amcat.scraping.controller",
    "__main__"]

loggerdict = logging.Logger.manager.loggerDict #all loggers
for name, logger in loggerdict.items():
    if name in should_work:
        print("
logger: "+name)
        #iterate through parents see if effective handlers are set correctly
        print(effectivehandlers(logger))
        #test logger
        logger.info("test for {name}".format(**locals()))

def effectivehandlers(logger):
    handlers = logger.handlers
    while True:
        logger = logger.parent
        handlers.extend(logger.handlers)
        if not (logger.parent and logger.propagate):
            break
    return handlers

The console output:

logger: __main__
[<logging.StreamHandler object at 0x3425d50>, <logging.FileHandler object at 0x3425dd0>]
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for __main__

logger: amcat.scraping.controller
[<logging.StreamHandler object at 0x3425d50>, <logging.FileHandler object at 0x3425dd0>]
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for amcat.scraping.controller
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for amcat.scraping.controller

logger: amcat.scraping.htmltools
[<logging.StreamHandler object at 0x3425d50>, <logging.FileHandler object at 0x3425dd0>]
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for amcat.scraping.htmltools
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for amcat.scraping.htmltools

logger: amcat.scraping.scraper
[<logging.StreamHandler object at 0x3425d50>, <logging.FileHandler object at 0x3425dd0>]
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for amcat.scraping.scraper
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for amcat.scraping.scraper

And here's the file output:

[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for __main__
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for amcat.scraping.controller
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for amcat.scraping.controller
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for amcat.scraping.htmltools
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for amcat.scraping.htmltools
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for amcat.scraping.scraper
[2013-10-24 10:27:30 daily.py:133 INFO] test for amcat.scraping.scraper

As you can see, the output is double, despite having disabled propagation and making sure no duplicate handlers are present. Where does this go wrong?

Answer 1

Basically, when one of your child logger displays a message, it goes backwards in the hierarchy, and the parents are also logging the same thing.

To cancel that behavior, you can add this:

logger.propagate = False

When it hits the child, it won't hit the parent afterwards.

Here is some documentation about this behavior.