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`to_repr` and `rich` breaks logging

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@pranjalm37 is already working on this.

Since Aug 8, 2026.

  • #837 by @pranjalm37 — open

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
20/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
backend

Research direction

Read the traceback through structlog/tracebacks.py and the reported use of ExceptionDictTransformer(use_rich=False); the issue does not identify a specific test. First check open pull request #837, which is already addressing this issue. Done means the Rich-related logging failure and the question of configuring use_rich globally are resolved.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

external

Structlog version: 24.4.0

⭐ First of all - love this project, huge fan, good job.

Hello,

Maybe this is just bad setup on our end, but it was tricky to figure out so I decided to raise it.

We use structlog for logging data from our service in json format, and then uploading it into DataDog. After updating structlog to version 24.4.0 our logging started to break each time we logged an exception ( structlog.get_logger().exception(...))

I was able to trace the root cause to this PR: https://github.com/hynek/structlog/pull/627, where the implementation for to_repr changed to:

def to_repr(
    obj: Any,
    max_length: int | None = None,
    max_string: int | None = None,
    use_rich: bool = True, # source of the problem
) -> str:

and I was able to hotfix the the problem on our end by creating our own dict_tracebacks and setting use_rich explicitly.

custom_dict_tracebacks =  ExceptionRenderer(ExceptionDictTransformer(use_rich=False))
Stack Trace 
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/structlog/_base.py", line 165, in _process_event

event_dict = proc(self._logger, method_name, event_dict)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/structlog/processors.py", line 412, in __call__

event_dict["exception"] = self.format_exception(
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/structlog/tracebacks.py", line 415, in __call__

trace = extract(
^^^^^^^^

File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/structlog/tracebacks.py", line 276, in extract

key: to_repr(
^^^^^^^^

File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/structlog/tracebacks.py", line 147, in to_repr

obj_repr = rich.pretty.traverse(
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/rich/pretty.py", line 853, in traverse

node = _traverse(_object, root=True)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

File "/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/rich/pretty.py", line 767, in _traverse

child_node = _traverse(getattr(obj, field.name), depth=depth + 1)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

AttributeError: 'MemoryObjectItemReceiver' object has no attribute 'item'

Since we don't install rich on the server, I'm not really sure how it was able to import it in the first place (my guess is transitive dependency), or why it failed.

But would it make sense to somehow configure the use_rich flag globally?

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