Benefit of using logging over print() to log information to Papertrail in a Django Heroku app

Question

I have a Django app that I'm hosting on Heroku and logging to Papertrail via the Papertrail Heroku add-on. There are numerous places where I'm logging information to Papertrail directly, currently by:

logger = logging.getLogger('papertrail')
logger.info('important text')

I set up the logging configuration according to this link:

import sys

LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': False,
    'handlers': {
        'console': {
            'level': 'INFO',
            'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
            'stream': sys.stdout,
        },
    },
    'loggers': {
        'django': {
            'handlers': ['console'],
            'level': 'ERROR',
        },
        'papertrail': {
            'handlers': ['console'],
            'level': 'INFO',
        },
    },
}

Together, this logs to Papertrail like so:

Feb 07 06:10:56 app_name app/worker.1: important text

However, I noticed that using print('important text') accomplishes the same thing here. Is there any benefit to continuing to use logging over print to log the "important text" in this situation? I read through this article and none of it seemed to apply here.

Answer 1

I find myself asking that question sometimes, and I usually conclude that print is useful for debugging, but logging is more powerful for everything else.

For instance, logging has log levels, which show severity. And also, logging allows to write logs and output, errors, etc to files.

Any application in production should have a comprehensive logging system in place for these reasons and more.

Take a read through this and it should become clearer:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/topics/logging/

If you aren't convinced by this answer and the article you cited, I'd recommend doing more research. Otherwise, continue to use print and maybe you'll convince yourself eventually.