Unittesting Support

Logbook has builtin support for testing logging calls. There is a handler that can be hooked in and will catch all log records for inspection. Not only that, it also provides methods to test if certain things were logged.

Basic Setup

The interface to satisfaction is logbook.TestHandler. Create it, and bind it, and you’re done. If you are using classic unittest test cases, you might want to set it up in the before and after callback methods:

import logbook
import unittest

class LoggingTestCase(unittest.TestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        self.log_handler = logbook.TestHandler()
        self.log_handler.push_thread()

    def tearDown(self):
        self.log_handler.pop_thread()

Alternatively you can also use it in a with statement in an individual test. This is also how this can work in nose and other testing systems:

def my_test():
    with logbook.TestHandler() as log_handler:
        ...

Test Handler Interface

The test handler has a few attributes and methods to gain access to the logged messages. The most important ones are records and formatted_records. The first is a list of the captured LogRecords, the second a list of the formatted records as unicode strings:

>>> from logbook import TestHandler, Logger
>>> logger = Logger('Testing')
>>> handler = TestHandler()
>>> handler.push_thread()
>>> logger.warn('Hello World')
>>> handler.records
[<logbook.base.LogRecord object at 0x100640cd0>]
>>> handler.formatted_records
[u'[WARNING] Testing: Hello World']

Probe Log Records

The handler also provide some convenience methods to do assertions:

>>> handler.has_warnings
True
>>> handler.has_errors
False
>>> handler.has_warning('Hello World')
True

Methods like has_warning() accept two arguments:

message

If provided and not None it will check if there is at least one log record where the message matches. This can also be a compiled regular expression.

channel

If provided and not None it will check if there is at least one log record where the logger name of the record matches.

Example usage:

>>> handler.has_warning('A different message')
False
>>> handler.has_warning(re.compile('^Hello'))
True
>>> handler.has_warning('Hello World', channel='Testing')
True
>>> handler.has_warning(channel='Testing')
True