---
title: journald-send - Library to help write logs to journald, for Python
date: 2026-06-14 08:25:04.720706 UTC
---
In that last April, I made [journald-send], to serve as replacement for [systemd-python], for folks who want to write logs to `journald`, using native protocol.

It is a partial replacement, because it only offers the "write" part, not "read". That's enough because most of applications which want to talk with `journald` just need to "write". I made [journald-send] out of the frustration that `systemd-python` development seems to be stuck, the last release was on the beginning of 2023, when it is 2026 now, and the compatibility with Python 3.14 is uncertain. Even after I contributed some code to modernize the Python project structure, the core developers still seems to not rush to make a release.

I wrote [jounald-send] in Rust, aiming for Python 3.14 free-threaded (No GIL) mode. Because I only need to support "write" operation, I decide not to depend on the C `libsystemd`, and go further by using Rust pure libraries ([rustix] and [memfd]) to talk with Linux API. I learnt from [tracing-journald] for how to prepare data for journald protocol and which steps to do with the sockets. The difference is that [tracing-journald] is using `libc` and I use [rustix], [memfd].

After finishing [journald-send], I updated my other libraries [chameleon-log], [structlog-journald] to use `journald-send` under the hood. [chameleon-log] is for integrating [logbook] and [structlog-journald] is for integrating with [structlog].
While `journald-send` is the "sink" part, `logbook` and `structlog` is the "source" part.

[journald-send]: https://pypi.org/project/journald-send/
[systemd-python]: https://pypi.org/project/systemd-python/
[rustix]: https://crates.io/crates/rustix
[memfd]: https://crates.io/crates/memfd
[tracing-journald]: https://crates.io/crates/tracing-journald
[chameleon-log]: https://pypi.org/project/chameleon-log/
[structlog-journald]: https://pypi.org/project/structlog-journald/
[structlog]: https://www.structlog.org/
[logbook]: https://pypi.org/project/Logbook/