Linux daemon using Python daemon with PID file and logging

The python-daemon package (PyPI listing, Pagure repo) is very useful. However, I feel it has suffered a bit from sparse documentation, and the inclusion of a "runner" example, which is in the process of being deprecated as of 2 weeks ago (2016-10-26).

There are several questions about it on StackOverflow, going back a few years:  2009, 2011, 2012, and 2015. Some refer to the included runner.py as an example, which is being deprecated.

So, I decided to figure it out myself. I wanted to use the PID lockfile mechanism provided by python-daemon, and also the Python logging module. The inline documentation for python-daemon mention the files_preserve parameter, a list of file handles which should be held open when the daemon process is forked off. However, there wasn't an explicit example, and one StackOverflow solution for logging under python-daemon mentions that the file handle for logging objects may not be obvious:

• for a StreamHandler, it's logging.root.handlers[0].stream.fileno()
• for a SyslogHandler, it's logging.root.handlers[1].socket.fileno()

After a bunch of experiments, I think I have sorted it out to my own satisfaction. My example code is in GitHub: prehensilecode/python-daemon-example. It also has a SysV init script. 

The daemon itself is straigtforward, doing nothing but logging timestamps to the logfile. The full code is pasted here:

#!/usr/bin/env python3.5
import sys
import os
import time
import argparse
import logging
import daemon
from daemon import pidfile

debug_p = False

def do_something(logf):
    ### This does the "work" of the daemon

    logger = logging.getLogger('eg_daemon')
    logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)

    fh = logging.FileHandler(logf)
    fh.setLevel(logging.INFO)

    formatstr = '%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s'
    formatter = logging.Formatter(formatstr)

    fh.setFormatter(formatter)

    logger.addHandler(fh)

    while True:
        logger.debug("this is an DEBUG message")
        logger.info("this is an INFO message")
        logger.error("this is an ERROR message")
        time.sleep(5)


def start_daemon(pidf, logf):
    ### This launches the daemon in its context

    global debug_p

    if debug_p:
        print("eg_daemon: entered run()")
        print("eg_daemon: pidf = {}    logf = {}".format(pidf, logf))
        print("eg_daemon: about to start daemonization")

    ### XXX pidfile is a context
    with daemon.DaemonContext(
        working_directory='/var/lib/eg_daemon',
        umask=0o002,
        pidfile=pidfile.TimeoutPIDLockFile(pidf),
        ) as context:
        do_something(logf)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Example daemon in Python")
    parser.add_argument('-p', '--pid-file', default='/var/run/eg_daemon.pid')
    parser.add_argument('-l', '--log-file', default='/var/log/eg_daemon.log')

    args = parser.parse_args()
    
    start_daemon(pidf=args.pid_file, logf=args.log_file)