I was busy debugging a rest services I’m building in Flask and Flask-Restplus. I needed a way to log the request and response. I found some code that can be used as a wrapper of the WSGI application that does just this.

Create a file called dubug.py that contains the following code.

import pprint

class RequestLoggingWrapper(object):
    def __init__(self, app):
        self._app = app

    def __call__(self, environ, resp):
        errorlog = environ['wsgi.errors']
        pprint.pprint(('REQUEST', environ), stream=errorlog)

        def log_response(status, headers, *args):
            pprint.pprint(('RESPONSE', status, headers), stream=errorlog)
            return resp(status, headers, *args)

        return self._app(environ, log_response)

This wrapper works independently from Flask and wraps the WSGI application. It shows exactly what request is going in and what response is going out.

When running Flask with the built-in server you can use it as follows.

from debug import RequestLoggingWrapper

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.wsgi_app = RequestLoggingWrapper(app.wsgi_app)
    app.run()

The output goes to the wgi.error stream. For the built Flask server it is printed to stderr.