Logging instead of printing

I am trying to adopt logger.debug instead of print but ran into a confusing thing in ipython during Advent of Code... I riddled by script with logger.debug (yes after setting logging.setLevel('DEBUG')) but in ipython none of my log messages showed up!

import logging

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
logger.setLevel("DEBUG")

Turns out what I was missing was a call to basicConfig

import logging

# forget this and your messages are in the ether! or at least not seen in ipython...
logging.basicConfig()

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
logger.setLevel("DEBUG")

Bonus

Want your new messages to show up while iterating on something without killing the ipython kernel?

from importlib import reload
reload(logging) # to make sure you get new log messages you add while developing!