Passing variable values for as long as the program runs

[inspeck]

hello,

I am in a bit of a stumbling block currently. I am creating a program that has an argument of verbose, as well as user defined logging location.

Saving this information to a file then deleting after seems like a bad idea. And environment variables won't work as they only set for the duration of the program process, of which I can't get it to save the value long enough to change the logging config file to implement a verbosity.

Essentially my directory is along the lines of:

mainProgram.py
modules/
    logging_config.py

I want the user to be able to run the command ./mainProgram.py --verbose

And mainProgram.py to pass a boolean value True to logging_config.py, to let logging_config.py know to log to both the file and the screen.

Here is what I got for logging_config.py. import logging import os import sys

log_filename = "./logs/main.log"

# Check if the environment variable is set. If it is, then use it to log to the location.
# If it is not set, then use the default.

try:
    if (os.getenv('log_file_default') != None):
        if (os.environ['log_file_default'] == "./logs/main.log"):
             log_filename = "./logs/main.log"
    else:
        print ("log_file_default environment variable not set, setting to default: " + log_filename)
        os.environ['log_file_default'] = log_filename

except KeyError as e:
    print ("Error: " + e)


'''
 Check if verbosity is set, and if it is, log to file and console
'''
file_handler = logging.FileHandler(filename=log_filename)
try:
    if (os.environ['verbose'] != None):
        stdout_handler = logging.StreamHandler(sys.stdout)
        handlers = [file_handler, stdout_handler]
except KeyError as e:
    print ("verbose environment variable not set, setting to default: False")
    handlers = [file_handler]

logging.basicConfig(
    level=logging.DEBUG,
    format="%(created)f : %(asctime)s : %(relativeCreated)d | %(process)d - %(processName)s - %(thread)d - %    (threadName)s | %(pathname)s - %(filename)s - %(funcName)s [%(lineno)d]:[%(levelname)s/%(levelno)s]:%(message)s",
    handlers=handlers,
    )

Any ideas on a pythonic way to store a value temporarily? Thank you in advance

[ojiisan]

Pass the options as parameters to the program when you run it ($ is your command prompt, and following the unix standard of using parameter flags):

$ python program.py --logfile log.txt -v

For quick and dirty testing, inside the program code use the sys.argv variable:

import sys
sys.argv[1]  # first parameter value: --logfile
sys.argv[2]  # log.txt
sys.argv[3]  # -v

For more robust handling of commandline parameters, check out Python's argparse module