Python in a Nutshell

Name

enable

Synopsis

enable(display=True,logdir=None,context=5)

Installs an exception hook, via sys.excepthook, to diagnose propagated exceptions. The hook displays the exception traceback on the browser if display is true. The hook logs the exception traceback to a file in directory logdir if logdir is not None. In the traceback, the hook shows context lines of source code per frame.

In practice, you can start all of your CGI scripts with:

import cgitb
cgitb.enable( )

and be assured of good error reporting to the browser with minimal effort on your part. Of course, when you don’t want users of your page to see Python tracebacks from your scripts on their browsers, you can call cgitb(False,'/my/log/dir') and get the error reports, with exception tracebacks, as files in directory /my/log/dir instead.