Logging

The platform provides logging for both backtesting and live trading using a high-performance logging system implemented in Rust with a standardized facade from the log crate.

The core logger operates in a separate thread and uses a multi-producer single consumer (MPSC) channel to receive log messages. This design ensures that the main thread is not blocked by log string formatting or file I/O operations.

There are two configurable writers for logging:

• stdout/stderr writer

• log file writer

Infrastructure such as vector can be configured to collect these log events.

Configuration

Logging can be configured by importing the LoggingConfig object. By default, log events with an ‘INFO’ LogLevel and higher are written to stdout/stderr.

Log level ( LogLevel ) values include (and generally match Rusts tracing level filters):

• OFF

• DEBUG

• INFO

• WARNING or WARN

• ERROR

Note

See the LoggingConfig API Reference for further details.

Logging can be configured in the following ways:

• Minimum LogLevel for stdout/stderr

• Minimum LogLevel for log files

• Automatic log file naming and daily rotation, or custom log file name

• Directory for writing log files

• Plain text or JSON log file formatting

• Filtering of individual components by log level

• ANSI colors in log lines

• Bypass logging completely

• Print Rust config to stdout at initialization

Standard output logging

Log messages are written to the console via stdout/stderr writers. The minimum log level can be configured using the log_level parameter.

File logging

Log files are written to the current working directory with daily rotation (UTC) by default.

The default naming convention is as follows:

• Trader ID

• ISO 8601 datetime

• Instance ID

• The log format suffix

{trader_id}_{%Y-%m-%d}_{instance_id}.{log | json}`

e.g. TESTER-001_2023-03-23_635a4539-4fe2-4cb1-9be3-3079ba8d879e.json

You can specify a custom log directory path using the log_directory parameter and/or a custom log file basename using the log_file_name parameter. The log files will always be suffixed with ‘.log’ for plain text, or ‘.json’ for JSON (no need to include a suffix in file names).

If the log file already exists, it will be appended to.

Component filtering

The log_component_levels parameter can be used to set log levels for each component individually. The input value should be a dictionary of component ID strings to log level strings: dict[str, str] .

Below is an example of a trading node logging configuration that includes some of the options mentioned above:

from nautilus_trader.config import LoggingConfig
from nautilus_trader.config import TradingNodeConfig

config_node = TradingNodeConfig(
    trader_id="TESTER-001",
    logging=LoggingConfig(
        log_level="INFO",
        log_level_file="DEBUG",
        log_file_format="json",
        log_component_levels={ "Portfolio": "INFO" },
    ),
    ... # Omitted
)

For backtesting, the BacktestEngineConfig class can be used instead of TradingNodeConfig , as the same options are available.

Log Colors

ANSI color codes are utilized to enhance the readability of logs when viewed in a terminal. These color codes can make it easier to distinguish different parts of log messages. However, in environments that do not support ANSI color rendering (such as some cloud environments or text editors), these color codes may not be appropriate as they can appear as raw text.

To accommodate for such scenarios, the LoggingConfig.log_colors option can be set to false . Disabling log_colors will prevent the addition of ANSI color codes to the log messages, ensuring compatibility across different environments where color rendering is not supported.

Using a Logger directly

It’s possible to use Logger objects directly, and these can be initialized anywhere (very similar to the Python built-in logging API).

If you aren’t using an object which already initializes a NautilusKernel (and logging) such as BacktestEngine or TradingNode , then you can initialize logging in the following way:

from nautilus_trader.common.component import init_logging
from nautilus_trader.common.component import Logger

log_guard = init_logging()
logger = Logger("MyLogger")

Note

See the init_logging API Reference for further details.

Warning

Only one logging system can be initialized per process with an init_logging call, and the LogGuard which is returned must be kept alive for the lifetime of the program.