Dynamically changing log level without restarting the application

fileConfig is a mechanism to configure the log level for you based on a file; you can dynamically change it at any time in your program.

Call .setLevel() on the logging object for which you want to change the log level. Usually you'd do that on the root:

logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

In addition to the accepted answer: Depending on how you initialized the logger, you might also have to update the logger's handlers:

import logging

level = logging.DEBUG
logger = logging.getLogger()
logger.setLevel(level)
for handler in logger.handlers:
    handler.setLevel(level)