Preferred way store additional context about the error

[Glyphack]

I'm using django-tasks to run a task that sometimes fails. When it fails I have access to stacktrace and the error raised. But if the exception itself has more information it's not captured, this is behavior is documented.

But I would like a way to capture additional information about the task failure.

In my code I raise the following exception:

raise subprocess.CalledProcessError(
	process.returncode, cmd, output=stdout, stderr=stderr
)

And only the exception type and stacktrace are stored in the database.

I'm wondering what would be a good way to store the additional information from the error in the task.
This could be solved by logs as well. For example prefixing all the logs with task_id and then search the logs.

[RealOrangeOne]

I don't think there's a "preferred" way. There are a few different options. Presumably you need to change application behaviour rather than this just being useful for debugging?

Smuggling the data out and saving it to a DB model might be a better way, or possibly changing the return type so the task always succeeds but then stores extra context.

Alternatively, handle CalledProcessError, identify the cases you'd need to handle inside the task, and raise specific exceptions instead.