Setting up logging in a sane way in Django has been surprisingly difficult due to some confusing setting names and the annoying way Django's default logging setup looks like. Here I'll go through some simple steps you can take to gain full control of your logging setup, without too many changes to a standard Django setup.

First of all, set LOGGING_CONFIG = None to prevent Django from setting up logging for you at all. You want this because in addition to the LOGGING dict that you define, Django has some defaults settings it will use, which you may not want.

Because we've set this, we need to call logging.dictConfig(LOGGING) ourselves. This can happen at the end of your settings file.

Make sure that LOGGING['disable_existing_loggers'] = False. If this is set to true, any loggers defined or invoked before logging.dictConfig is called will silently discard all its messages. You definitely don't want that.

Finally, I like to define LOGGING['root'] to have one log instance that controls everything, but sometimes log messages don't get sent to it. I found that setting the "" (empty string) logger can fix this:

LOGGING['loggers'][''] = { 'propagate': True }