Inconsistent logging of 5xx and 4xx requests to django.request

[Samir Shah]

The documentation for django.request says:

Log messages related to the handling of requests. 5XX responses are raised as ERROR messages; 4XX responses are raised as WARNING messages.

The actual behaviour is not quite consistent with this:

• Only 4xx and 500 responses are logged to django.request - not any other responses in the 5xx range.

• 500 responses are only logged if they are the result of an uncaught exception. The logging happens in django.core.handlers.base.handle_uncaught_exception. If a view manually sets a 500 response somewhere, this isn't logged.

• The same was true of 404 responses (they were only logged if an uncaught Http404 was raised), until the change made in ticket:26504 inadvertently altered this behaviour. After that change, all 404s are logged regardless of how they are generated.

• Other 4xx responses meanwhile are only logged as the result of an exception (PermissionDenied etc.), not if the status code is set manually.

• 400 responses are logged to django.security but not to django.request.

I would be happy to submit a patch that addresses this but would like some guidance on what the best solution is. My initial thoughts are:

• I think Django should log all 5xx responses, regardless of how they were generated. This would mean refactoring the logic that does this logging.

• Either log all 4xx responses to django.request or change the documentation to list what specific responses are logged.

[Sergio Oliveira]

The logging behavior is clearly inconsistent with the docs. The documented behavior is preferable over the current one so that's actually a bug.

[Sergio Oliveira]

​https://github.com/django/django/pull/6716

[Tim Graham]

Patch needs a rebase and I left some additional comments for improvement.

[Samir Shah]

I've taken the liberty of updating the original PR to work with changes in the code base since it was created - ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/8752. Most of the original work way done by Sergio.

[Tim Martin]

This looks good to me. I had a minor documentation comment on the patch review.

[Samir Shah]

Tim - thanks for the review. I've updated the ​PR to address your comments.

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In 10b44e45:

Fixed #26688 -- Fixed HTTP request logging inconsistencies.

• Added logging of 500 responses for instantiated responses.
• Added logging of all 4xx and 5xx responses.