Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

logging.basicConfig(force=False) on empty handler list never initializes Formatter and Handler

Open
#979 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start in python-stdlib/logging/logging.py around line 235, where basicConfig(force=False) evaluates Logger.handlers. Compare that logic with Logger.hasHandlers() and trace initialization for the empty-handler case. Done means a logger created after basicConfig receives a working Handler and Formatter without changing the documented MicroPython asctime limitation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Aiming to add minimalistic logging capabilities soon within starting phase of a micropythion program, one would call:

#minimalistic
logging.basicConfig(stream=stream.sys level=logging.DEBUG)
logger = logging.getLogger('thelog')

Aiming to get a fancy timestamp and information ordering, the call could look like:

# explicit formatting
log_fmt_mipy = "%(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s"
log_fmt_dat_mipy = "%(asctime)s.%(msecs)03d"
logging.basicConfig(stream=stream.sys level=logging.DEBUG)
logger = logging.getLogger('thelog')

The Object "logger" as Logger instance on either case will NEVER get a working Handler and Formatter upon initialization. This is because logging.basicConfig() in (current) line 235 evaluates the list object Logger.handlers instead of the integer number Logger.hasHandlers().

NOTE: Initialization of a date format of type "asctime" within micropython, as shown in the code above, is not (yet) supported (by design) and thus requires explicit implementation efforts.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
2.9k
Forks
1.1k
Avg merge
7d 4h
Merged PRs (30d)
4

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from micropython/micropython-lib

All issues in micropython/micropython-lib

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.