What’s New

1.8.0

Features:

  • Eliot now supports Trio coroutines, as well as other frameworks that utilize Python 3.7’s contextvars (Python 3.5 and 3.6 are also supported, using backport packages).

Deprecation:

  • eliot.use_asyncio_context() is no longer necessary. On Python 3.5 and 3.6, however, you should make sure to import eliot (or aiocontextvars) before you start your first event loop.

Changes:

  • Python 2.7 is now in legacy support mode; the last major Eliot release supporting it is 1.7.0. See Python 2.7 Support for details.
  • Python 3.4 is no longer supported.

1.7.0

Documentation:

  • Eliot has an API for testing that your logs were output correctly. Until now, however, the documentation was overly focused on requiring usage of types, which are optional, so it has been rewritten to be more generic: read more about the testing API here.

Features:

  • Generating messages is much faster.
  • Eliot now works with PyInstaller. Thanks to Jean-Paul Calderone for the bug report. Fixes issue #386.
  • The testing infrastructure now has slightly more informative error messages. Thanks to Jean-Paul Calderone for the bug report. Fixes issue #373.
  • Added lower-level testing infrastructure—eliot.testing.swap_logger and eliot.testing.check_for_errors—which is useful for cases when the @capture_logging decorator is insufficient. For example, test methods that are async, or return Twisted Deferred. See the testing documentation for details. Thanks to Jean-Paul Calderone for the feature request. Fixes #364.
  • eliot.ValidationError, as raised by e.g. capture_logging, is now part of the public API. Fixed issue #146.

Twisted-related features:

  • New decorator, @eliot.twisted.inline_callbacks , which is like Twisted’s inlineCallbacks but which also manages the Eliot context. Thanks to Jean-Paul Calderone for the fix. Fixed issue #259.
  • eliot.twisted.DeferredContext.addCallbacks now supports omitting the errback, for compatibility with Twisted’s Deferred. Thanks to Jean-Paul Calderone for the fix. Fixed issue #366.

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed bug in the asyncio coroutine support where only the thread where use_asyncio_context() was called supported coroutine-specific contexts. Fixes issue #388.
  • ILogger.write is now explicitly thread-safe. The MemoryLogger (as used by tests) implementation of this method which was previously not thread-safe is now thread-safe. Thanks to Jean-Paul Calderone for the patch. Fixes issue #382.

1.6.0

Deprecation:

  • Python 2 is still supported, but will be dropped in one of the next releases. See Python 2.7 Support.

Features:

  • NumPy integers, floats, bools and arrays are now automatically serialized to JSON, via a new default JSON encoder (eliot.json.EliotJSONEncoder).
  • Dask support: replace dask.compute() with eliot.dask.compute_with_trace() to automatically preserve Eliot context for Bag and Delayed Dask computations. See Using Dask for details.
  • New decorator, @eliot.log_call, which automatically creates an action that starts when function is called and ends when it returns. See Logging Functions.
  • A parser library for parsing serialized Eliot JSON messages into a tree of Python objects. See Parsing Logs for details.

Testing features:

  • eliot.testing.LoggedAction has a new method, type_tree(), that returns the tree of action and message types. This allows for easier testing of action structure.
  • eliot.testing.LoggedAction.of_type now accepts the type as a string, not just an eliot.ActionType instance. Similarly, LoggedMessage.of_type also accepts the type as a string.

1.5.0

Bug fixes:

  • The standard library logging bridge now logs tracebacks, not just messages.

Features:

  • You can now pass in an explicit traceback tuple to write_traceback.

Changes:

  • The deprecated system argument to write_traceback and writeFailure has been removed.

1.4.0

Features:

  • Added support for routing standard library logging into Eliot; see Route existing logs to Eliot for details.
  • Added support for Python 3.7.

Output format changes:

  • All messages now have either message_type or action_type fields.

Documentation:

  • Documented how to add log levels, and how to filter Eliot logs.
  • Logstash configuration is closer to modern version’s options, though still untested.
  • Explained how to integrate/migrate existing logging with Eliot.

1.3.0

Features:

  • The default JSON output format now supports custom JSON encoders. See Customizing JSON Encoding for details. Thanks to Jonathan Jacobs for feedback.

Bug fixes:

  • MemoryLogger.validate() now gives more informative errors if JSON encoding fails. Thanks to Jean-Paul Calderone for the bug report.

Deprecations:

  • On Python 3, the JSON encoder used by to_file and FileDestination would accept bytes… sometimes. This is deprecated, and will cease to work in a future release of Eliot (on Python 3, it will continue to work on Python 2). If you wish to include bytes in JSON logging, convert it to a string in the log-generating code, use Eliot’s type system, or use a custom JSON encoder.

1.2.0

Features:

  • Eliot now does the right thing for asyncio coroutines in Python 3.5 and later. See Asyncio/Trio Coroutine Support for details. Thanks to x0zzz for the bug report.

Misc:

  • Action.continue_task can now accept text task IDs (str in Python 3, unicode in Python 2).

1.1.0

Features:

  • Messages are no longer lost if they are logged before any destinations are added. In particular, messages will be buffered in memory until the first set of destinations are added, at which point those messages will be delivered. Thanks to Jean-Paul Calderone for the feature request.
  • eliot.add_destinations replaces eliot.add_destination, and accepts multiple Destinations at once.
  • eliot.twisted.TwistedDestination allows redirecting Eliot logs to twisted.logger. Thanks to Glyph Lefkowitz for the feature request.

Misc:

  • Coding standard switched to PEP-8.
  • Dropped support for Python 3.3.
  • Dropped support for versions of Twisted older than 15.2 (or whenever it was that twisted.logger was introduced).
  • Dropped support for ujson.

1.0.0

Eliot is stable, and has been for a while, so switching to v1.0.

Features:

  • New API: MessageType.log(), the equivalent of Message.log(), allows you to quickly create a new typed log message and write it out.
  • New APIs: eliot.current_action() returns the current Action, and Action.task_uuid is the task’s UUID.
  • You can now do with YOUR_ACTION().context() as action:, i.e. Action.context() context manager returns the Action instance.
  • ActionType.as_task no longer requires a logger argument, matching the other APIs where passing in a logger is optional.

0.12.0

Features:

  • Python 3.6 support.

Misc:

  • Made test suite pass again with latest Hypothesis release.

0.11.0

Features:

  • Eliot tasks can now more easily span multiple threads using the new eliot.preserve_context API.
  • eliot-prettyprint command line tool now pretty prints field values in a more informative manner.

Bug fixes:

  • eliot-prettyprint now handles unparseable lines by skipping formatting them rather than exiting.

0.10.1

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed regression in 0.10.0: fix validation of failed actions and tracebacks with extracted additional fields.

0.10.0

Features:

Bug fixes:

  • Journald support works on Python 3.

0.9.0

Features:

  • Native journald support.
  • eliot-prettyprint is a command-line tool that formats JSON Eliot messages into a more human-friendly format.
  • eliot.logwriter.ThreadedWriter is a Twisted non-blocking wrapper for any blocking destination.

0.8.0

Features:

  • Message.log will log a new message, combining the existing Message.new and Message.write.
  • write_traceback and writeFailure no longer require a Logger; they now default to using the global one.
  • The logs written with redirectLogsForTrial are now written in JSON format, rather than with pformat.

Bug fixes:

  • FileDestination will now call flush() on the given file object after writing the log message. Previously log messages would not end up being written out until the file buffer filled up.
  • Each Message logged outside the context of an action now gets a unique task_id.

0.7.0

  • Creating your own Logger instances is no longer necessary; all relevant APIs now default to using a global one. A new testing decorator (eliot.testing.capture_logging) was added to capture global logging.
  • Support positional Field-instance arguments to fields() to make combining existing field types and simple fields more convenient. Contributed by Jonathan Jacobs.
  • write_traceback and writeFailure no longer require a system argument, as the combination of traceback and action context should suffice to discover the origin of the problem. This is a minor change to output format as the field is also omitted from the resulting eliot:traceback messages.
  • The validate_logging testing utility now skips validation when the decorated test method raises SkipTest.
  • Exceptions in destinations are now handled better: instead of being dropped silently an attempt is made to log a message about the problem. If that also fails then the exception is dropped.

0.6.0

Warning

Incompatible output format change! In previous versions the ordering of messages and actions was ambiguous and could not be deduced from out-of-order logs, and even where it was possible sorting correctly was difficult. To fix this the action_counter field was removed and now all messages can be uniquely located within a specific task by the values in an improved task_level field.

Features:

  • Eliot tasks can now span multiple processes and threads, allowing for easy tracing of actions in complex and distributed applications.
  • eliot.add_global_fields allows adding fields with specific values to all Eliot messages logged by your program. This can be used to e.g. distinguish between log messages from different processes by including relevant identifying information.

Bug fixes:

  • On Python 3 files that accept unicode (e.g. sys.stdout) should now work.

0.5.0

Features:

  • Added support for Python 3.4.
  • Most public methods and functions now have underscore-based equivalents to the camel case versions, e.g. eliot.write_traceback and eliot.writeTraceback, for use in PEP 8 styled programs. Twisted-facing APIs and pyunit assertions do not provide these additional APIs, as camel-case is the native idiom.
  • eliot.to_file outputs log messages to a file.
  • Documented how to load Eliot logging into ElasticSearch via Logstash.
  • Documentation has been significantly reorganized.

0.4.0

Note that this is the last release that will make incompatible API changes without interim deprecation warnings.

Incompatible changes from 0.3.0:

  • Logger no longer does JSON serialization; it’s up to destinations to decide how to serialize the dictionaries they receive.
  • Timestamps are no longer encoded in TAI64N format; they are now provided as seconds since the Unix epoch.
  • ActionType no longer supports defining additional failure fields, and therefore accepts one argument less.
  • Action.runCallback and Action.finishAfter have been removed, as they are replaced by DeferredContext (see below).

Features:

  • Added a simpler API (fields()) for defining fields for ActionType and MessageType.
  • Added support for Python 3.3.
  • Actions can now be explicitly finished using a public API: Action.finish().
  • Action.context() context manager allows setting an action context without finishing the action when exiting the block.
  • Added a new API for Twisted Deferred support: eliot.twisted.DeferredContext.
  • eliot.twisted.redirectLogsForTrial will redirect Eliot logs to Twisted’s logs when running under the trial test runner.