How can you silence Liesel's "info" messages?

[Seb-Lorek]

In general I really like the print statements (from logging) during model building and inference of liesel , especially when using liesel in a .ipynb file or in a "small" application. But I'm searching for a way to silence Liesel's "info" messages such that the console is not cluttered with all the print statements when running liesel in a python script. This would be helpful when using liesel in a larger project, where I might execute different subtasks and want to print only "global" information on the different subtasks rather than the "infos"/"warnings" of liesel. I saw that there is the option to set

engine._show_progress = False

This prohibits the print statement of the sampling progress. But I'm currently not aware on how to disable the other print statements (or catch them). Happy to receive some input on that.

[jobrachem]

Hi @Seb-Lorek, really nice to see you regularly contributing here 👍

Since we use Python's logging module, I think your desired behavior can be achieved by adjusting the log level.

Consider the following example:

There are five different logging levels. Most of the verbose feedback from liesel can be silenced by setting the logging level to "warning", as in the example above. You can even control the behavior for the logging messages issued by individual submodules, if you replace the logger = logging.getLogger("liesel") above for example with the more specific logger = logging.getLogger("liesel.model.model"). For the sampling messages issued by goose, you might want to set the log level of the "liesel.goose.engine" logger to logging.ERROR, if you are not interested in those messages. I would be hesitant to recommend setting the log level generally to this value, though, because you might miss something important.

Here's the docs of the logging module: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/logging.html#logging-basic-tutorial

[Seb-Lorek]

Nice this is exactly what I was looking for, thanks!

[jeli2103]

Hello,

I agree that some messages might be of importance. So you better save them to a file:

# loggers (info level)
logger_liesel = logging.getLogger('liesel')
logger_liesel.setLevel(logging.INFO)

# create file handler which logs to file
fh = logging.FileHandler('spam.log')
fh.setLevel(logging.INFO)

# create formatter and add
formatter = logging.Formatter('%(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s')
fh.setFormatter(formatter)

# add handler
logger_liesel.addHandler(fh)

So you have all outputs in the spam.log file. However, I was not able to find a solution to log to a file but not logging to the console (but this should not be a liesel question..., but if you have the answered at hand, help is appreciated)

[jobrachem]

@liesel-groupie thanks for the code example! 😊 I think it is ok if we treat your question about logging to a file + silencing output to the console as a liesel question, since it depends a little on liesel's default logging setup. To keep things organized, I would recommend that you open another question for that, then I will provide a solution there.