lithoxyl

Application instrumentation and logging, with a geological bent. Documentation is available on Read the Docs.

An infomercial of sorts

"Has this ever happened to you?"

Here's an example of some ostensibly well-instrumented code.

import logging

def create_user(name):
    logging.info('creating user with name %r', name)
    try:
        success = _create_user(name)
        if success:
            logging.info('successfully created user %r', name)
        else:
            logging.error('failed to create user %r', name)
    except Exception:
        logging.critical('exception encountered while creating user %r',
                         name, exc_info=True)
    return success

Notice how the logging statements tend to dominate the code, almost drowning out the meaning of the code.

Here's lithoxyl's take:

from lithoxyl import stderr_log

def create_user(name):
    with stderr_log.critical('user creation', username=name, reraise=False) as r:
        success = _create_user(name)
        if not success:
            r.failure()
    return success

Feature brief

• Transactional logging
• Semantic instrumentation
• Pure Python
• Pythonic context manager API minimizes developer errors
• Decorator syntax is convenient and unobtrusive
• Human-readable structured logs
• Reparseability thanks to autoescaping
• Statistical accumulators for prerolled metrics
• Programmatic configuration with sensible defaults just an import away
• Synchronous mode for simplicity
• Asynchronous operation for performance critical applications
• Log file headers for metadata handling
• Heartbeat for periodic output and checkpointing
• Automatic, fast log parser generation (TBI)
• Sinks
  • EWMASink
  • DebuggerSink
  • MomentSink
  • QuantileSink
  • StreamSink
  • SyslogSink
  • and more

Reasons to use Lithoxyl

• More specific: distinguishes between level and status
• Safer: Transactional logging ensures that exceptions are always recorded appropriately
• Lower overhead: Lithoxyl can be used more places in code (e.g., tight loops), as well as more environments, without concern of excess overhead.
• More Pythonic: Python's logging module is a port of log4j, and it shows.
• No global state: Lithoxyl has virtually no internal global state, meaning fewer gotchas overall
• Higher concurrency: less global state and less overhead mean fewer places where contention can occur
• More succinct: Rather than try/except/finally, use a simple with block
• More useful: Lithoxyl represents a balance between logging and profiling
• More composable: Get exactly what you want by recombining new and provided components
• More lightweight: Simplicity, composability, and practicality, make Lithoxyl something one might reach for earlier in the development process. Logging shouldn't be an afterthought, nor should it be a big investment that weighs down development, maintenance, and refactoring.

Development

lithoxyl uses uv for development. To get started:

# Create a virtualenv and install dev dependencies
uv venv && uv pip install -e '.[dev]'

# Run tests
uv run pytest lithoxyl/tests/ -v

# Run tests across Python versions with tox
uvx --with tox-uv tox

Releases are managed with CalVer (YY.MINOR.MICRO) and published automatically to PyPI via GitHub Actions on tag push. See .omp/skills/release/SKILL.md for the full release procedure.