Introduction
You can also configure log4j in an xml format. This is required if you want to use some of the new features from apache-log4j-extra, such as the TimeBasedRollingPolicy, which rolls your files at midnight and gzips them!
Configuration
In order to configure your portal project this way you need to do a few things. If you want to do it the quick way, just apply the patch I've attached to this page. Otherwise keep reading.
log4j.xml
Delete your log4j.properties file and create: uportal-war/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/log4j.xml
There's some pretty good documentation on the log4j.xml format here.
If you want dtd validation copy log4j.dtd from the log4j source to that directory.
Here's the file CalPoly uses:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <!DOCTYPE log4j:configuration SYSTEM "log4j.dtd"> <!-- Note that this file is refreshed by the server every 60seconds, as specified in web.xml --> <log4j:configuration debug="true"> <appender name="ROLL" class="org.apache.log4j.rolling.RollingFileAppender"> <!-- The active file to log to --> <param name="file" value="/applogs/myportal/portal.log" /> <param name="append" value="true" /> <param name="encoding" value="UTF-8" /> <rollingPolicy class="org.apache.log4j.rolling.TimeBasedRollingPolicy"> <!-- The file to roll to, this is a fairly intelligent parameter, if the file ends in .gz, it gzips it, based on the date stamp it rolls at that time, default is yyyy-MM-dd, (rolls at midnight) See: http://logging.apache.org/log4j/companions/extras/apidocs/org/apache/log4j/rolling/TimeBasedRollingPolicy.html --> <param name="FileNamePattern" value="/applogs/myportal/portal.%d.log.gz" /> </rollingPolicy> <layout class="org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout"> <!-- The log message pattern --> <param name="ConversionPattern" value="%5p %d{ISO8601} [%t][%x] %c - %m%n" /> </layout> </appender> <!-- Loggers to filter out various class paths --> <logger name="org.hibernate.engine.loading.LoadContexts" additivity="false"> <level value="error"/> <appender-ref ref="ROLL" /> </logger> <!-- Debugging loggers --> <!-- Uncomment to enable debug on calpoly code only --> <!-- <logger name="edu.calpoly"> <level value="debug"/> <appender-ref ref="ROLL" /> </logger> --> <root> <priority value="info" /> <appender-ref ref="ROLL" /> </root> </log4j:configuration>
Note that you can also do advanced filtering on message contents with <filter /> but the documentation is a bit scarce and I had no need for it. (This is something you couldn't do with log4j.properties)