django-tracer

Generate a UUID for all requests to Django to be used in logging and error reporting for traceability.

Why?

Why would you want to use this silly little thing? Well in a containerized, orchestrated, microservice world with centralized logging it's often hard to figure out where things have gone wrong.

This little middleware adds a UUID to the normal Django request object which you can use to add to add to things like:

• All of your log messages
• Error reports to Sentry/Rollbar/etc
• Pass along to other internal services

Along with generating and attaching a UUID to each request, the middleware also automatically adds the UUID to the response headers as X-Request-ID so anyone consuming your responses, say as an API, can use that as a reference point for reporting errors back to you.

Installation

First you need to install it via pip:

pip install django-tracer

Then just add tracer to INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.

Then add tracer.middleware.RequestID to the top of your MIDDLEWARE settings.

Usage with standard logging

import logging

from django.http import HttpResponse

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)

def some_view(request):
    """ simple log example """
    logger.info("Whee!", extra={'request_id': request.id})
    return HttpResponse("example content")

Other ways to use this Request ID

There are several other places you may consider wanting to use the ID to improve traceability:

• Pass it as an argument to any Celery tasks you generate so there is a clear path between the incoming request and the tasks that were generated from it
• Pass it as a header or argument to other internal APIs or services
• Attach it to a bound structlog object so it is always included in your log output

Thanks!

Special thanks to Rolf Håvard Blindheim for graciously turning over the name django-tracer to us to be able to use it for this project.

Need help?

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