The simplest way to get logs out of a cron job

Cron jobs are silent by design. They run in the background, produce no visible output, and if they fail the only signal is usually a missing result or a full mail queue that nobody reads.

The usual workarounds are frustrating:

• MAILTO — requires a working MTA, generates noisy emails, and tells you nothing until the job finishes.
• Redirecting to a log file — you have to SSH in and tail -f to see anything, and the file grows forever.
• Piping to a monitoring service — most require agents, config files, and ongoing maintenance.

There's a simpler path: one Python import that gives the job a live stream URL.

The setup

pip install bunnylogs

Create a log stream on bunnylogs.com and grab the UUID. Then modify your cron script:

import logging
from bunnylogs import BunnyLogsHandler

logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO)
logger = logging.getLogger("nightly-sync")
logger.addHandler(BunnyLogsHandler("your-uuid-here"))

logger.info("nightly-sync started")

try:
    run_sync()
    logger.info("nightly-sync completed successfully")
except Exception as e:
    logger.error(f"nightly-sync failed: {e}", exc_info=True)

Open bunnylogs.com/live/your-uuid in a browser and watch the output appear in real time as the job runs.

A reusable wrapper pattern

If you have multiple cron jobs, extract the setup into a shared module so every job gets logging with one import:

# utils/logging.py
import logging
from bunnylogs import BunnyLogsHandler

def get_job_logger(name: str, uuid: str) -> logging.Logger:
    logger = logging.getLogger(name)
    logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)
    logger.addHandler(BunnyLogsHandler(uuid))
    return logger

# jobs/nightly_sync.py
from utils.logging import get_job_logger
import os

logger = get_job_logger("nightly-sync", os.environ["BUNNYLOGS_UUID"])

logger.info("starting")
# ... rest of job

Store the UUID in an environment variable or a secrets manager — don't commit it to source control.

Monitoring jobs across multiple servers

If the same job runs on several servers, send all of them to the same UUID so the live view aggregates output from every host:

import socket
logger = get_job_logger(f"nightly-sync/{socket.gethostname()}", BUNNYLOGS_UUID)

The program field in each log entry (set from the logger name) identifies which host sent each line.

Alerting on failure

BunnyLogs supports alerts that fire when a log line matches a pattern. Set up an alert for level=ERROR and program contains nightly-sync and you'll get a Slack or email notification within seconds of a failure — without polling, without agents, without a separate alerting service.

Try BunnyLogs free →