appenlight_client

Installation and Setup

Install the appenlight_client using pip:

pip install appenlight-client

Main Documentation location

The App Enlight developer documentation contains the most up to date information, including implementation guides in popular python web frameworks.

http://getappenlight.com/page/api/main.html

Usage

Before you can use the client inside your application, you first need to navigate to the directory that stores your application configuration and issue the following command:

$ENV/bin/python/appenlight_client makeini appenlight.ini

Usage (example for pyramid or other WSGI pipeline compatible solutions like Zope):

In your INI file, you need to add:

[filter:appenlight_client]
use = egg:appenlight_client
appenlight.config_path = %(here)s/appenlight.ini #optional if you don't want to set APPENLIGHT_INI env var

[pipeline:main]
pipeline =
    .....your other pipeline entries ....
    appenlight_client
    app_name

To minimize configuration complexity, the client will, by default, look for the APPENLIGHT_INI environment variable that will supply the absolute path to the config file.

For a pylons app, you can modify config/middleware.py: import the callable and add these lines:

#exception gathering
# CUSTOM MIDDLEWARE HERE (filtered by error handling middlewares)

app = make_appenlight_middleware(app,config)

and add to your ini:

appenlight.config_path = %(here)s/appenlight.ini #optional if you don't want to set APPENLIGHT_INI env var

The App Enlight client provides slow call and datastore timing capabilities; current out-of-the-box libraries supported:

• most used dbapi2 drivers
• django templates
• httplib
• jinja2 templates
• mongodb
• mako templates
• pysolr
• requests
• urllib
• urllib2
• urllib3

If for some reason you want to disable the timing of specific library, just set the time value to false.

Configuring appenlight and django

For a django framework, there is separate compatible middleware provided.

Modify your settings file to contain:

import appenlight_client.client as e_client
APPENLIGHT = e_client.get_config()

Additionally, the middleware stack needs to be modified with additional middleware:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'appenlight_client.django_middleware.AppenlightMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    ...

Please note that the App Enlight middleware should be placed first in your stack to function properly.

Run your django app providing the APPENLIGHT_INI env variable containing the absolute path to your config file.

Changing default scaffold configuration in Pyramid Web Framework

Default scaffolds in pyramid 1.3 have a section called [app:main] - the App Enlight client expects that you are using wsgi pipeline instead to position itself in it.

The easiest way to accomplish that is to alter your configuration file to look like this:

[app:main] becomes [app:yourappname]

and inside your configuration, above the [server:main] directive, the following directive should appear:

[pipeline:main]
pipeline =
    ... your other middleware you may have ...
    appenlight_client
    yourappname

Exception views in a Pyramid Web Framework and Appenlight

Pyramid uses exception views to serve nice html templates when an exception occurs. Unfortunately, this means that an exception is handled BEFORE it reaches App Enlight's middleware, so any 500 error data will never get sent to App Enlight.

This is how you can handle error handling inside your error_view:

def error_view(exc, request):
    from appenlight_client.exceptions import get_current_traceback
    from appenlight_client.timing import get_local_storage
    appenlight_storage = get_local_storage()
    stats, slow_calls = appenlight_storage.get_thread_stats()
    traceback = get_current_traceback(skip=1, show_hidden_frames=True, ignore_system_exceptions=True)
    request.environ['appenlight.client'].py_report(request.environ, traceback, message=None,http_status=500, request_stats=stats)
    request.response.status = 500
    return {}

Sensitive data filtering

The client by default blanks out COOKIE,POST, and GET for keys like: 'password','passwd','pwd','auth_tkt'

This behaviour can be altered to filter all kinds of data from the structures that get sent to the server by passing a dotted module name in configuration:

appenlight.filter_callable = foo.bar.baz:callable_name

example:

def callable_name(structure, section=None):
    structure['request']['SOMEVAL'] = '***REMOVED***'
    return structure

App Enlight will try to import foo.bar.baz and use callable_name as the function that accepts parameters (structure, section) and returns altered data structure.

Please note that this functionality can be used to alter things like the App Enlight grouping mechanism; you can set this variable based on values present in the structure generated by the client.

appenlight_client is BSD licensed, consult LICENSE for details.

client source: https://github.com/AppEnlight/appenlight-client-python