catalina.out rolling with Tomcat 6.0

Question

I have a default tomcat installation with no change to the logging configuration. The log files (in particular catalina.out) appear to be getting rolled (daily) correctly.

However as well as the daily logs there is also a catalina.out file, which just continues to grow. This is what I need to fix, ie have it cleared daily (or remove it altogether if possible)

Can someone explain what is going on here and the best best strategy for controlling that log file size?

Just to clarify the output is being written to catalina.out and the daily log simultaneously

-rw-r--r--  1 solr solr   90920663 Jul 18 01:16 logs/catalina.2009-07-18.log -rw-r--r--  1 solr solr     238010 Jul 18 01:16 logs/catalina.out 

Setting swallowOutput appears to not make any difference.

The application being run under tomcat is solr in case that is relevant.

Answer 1

Fixed it, turns out the standard logging configuration defines a file logger and also a console logger. The file logger goes to the daily catalina log, and the console logger writes to catalina.out.

Fix was to change in conf/logging.properties:

.handlers = 1catalina.org.apache.juli.FileHandler, java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler 

to

.handlers = 1catalina.org.apache.juli.FileHandler 

That stops anything getting written to catalina.out

Answer 2

Hi you may want to try this solution

http://java.dzone.com/articles/how-rotate-tomcat-catalinaout

It uses a cronjob (logrotate) to copy, compress and clean your catalina.out and if you have a look at logrotate you will see it has a lot of additional functionality. It does not interfere with the daily logs, unless you configure it do so. I found it helpful when I was confronted with the same problem.

BTW removing the console handler will only affect messages produced by Tomcat.