How do you log server errors on django sites
Well, when DEBUG = False, Django will automatically mail a full traceback of any error to each person listed in the ADMINS setting, which gets you notifications pretty much for free. If you'd like more fine-grained control, you can write and add to your settings a middleware class which defines a method named process_exception(), which will have access to the exception that was raised:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/middleware/#process-exception
Your process_exception() method can then perform whatever type of logging you'd like: writing to console, writing to a file, etc., etc.
Edit: though it's a bit less useful, you can also listen for the got_request_exception signal, which will be sent whenever an exception is encountered during request processing:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/signals/#got-request-exception
This does not give you access to the exception object, however, so the middleware method is much easier to work with.
Django Sentry is a good way to go, as already mentioned, but there is a bit of work involved in setting it up properly (as a separate website). If you just want to log everything to a simple text file here's the logging configuration to put in your settings.py
LOGGING = { 'version': 1, 'disable_existing_loggers': False, 'handlers': { # Include the default Django email handler for errors # This is what you'd get without configuring logging at all. 'mail_admins': { 'class': 'django.utils.log.AdminEmailHandler', 'level': 'ERROR', # But the emails are plain text by default - HTML is nicer 'include_html': True, }, # Log to a text file that can be rotated by logrotate 'logfile': { 'class': 'logging.handlers.WatchedFileHandler', 'filename': '/var/log/django/myapp.log' }, }, 'loggers': { # Again, default Django configuration to email unhandled exceptions 'django.request': { 'handlers': ['mail_admins'], 'level': 'ERROR', 'propagate': True, }, # Might as well log any errors anywhere else in Django 'django': { 'handlers': ['logfile'], 'level': 'ERROR', 'propagate': False, }, # Your own app - this assumes all your logger names start with "myapp." 'myapp': { 'handlers': ['logfile'], 'level': 'WARNING', # Or maybe INFO or DEBUG 'propagate': False }, },}
django-db-log, mentioned in another answer, has been replaced with: