How to rotate tomcat logs in Windows? What is the best method?

Question

I am really fed up in not being able to solve the tomcat log rotation problem in one our windows server after putting countless hours in it and after trying out various solutions.

• Environment: Java 1.6x, Tomcat 6 (running as service), log4j 1.2, Server 2003 32-bit

Methods tried so far:

1. cronolog didn't work, no files where being created after setting it up.

2. Managed to configure log4j with DailyRollingFile appender globally for Tomcat, the log files are being created without extension and are not being rotated.

3. Tried DatedFileAppender too, but didn't get much success.

4. Tried log4jna based Windows Event Log appender for log4j, there didn't get success

Please suggest an easy method to finish this task.

Answer 1

Apache Tomcat provides the configuration directory conf, that contains the file server.xml. At the bottom of this file, a line that includes the adjustments valve, called AccessLogValve must be un-commented and changed.

The default valve parameters and patterns can easily be modified through an editor. Your settings for the access log file for example may look like this:

<Valve
className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve."
directory="logs"
prefix="mysite."
suffix=".log"
pattern='%a %A %b %B %h %l %m %p %q %u %t "%r" %s %U %D %S'
resolveHosts="false"
rotatable="true"
fileDateFormat="yyyy-MM-dd"
/>

This sentence is from the Tomcat reference:

The fileDateFormat parameter allows a customized date format in the access log file name. The date format also decides how often the file is rotated. If you wish to rotate every hour, then set this value to: yyyy-MM-dd.HH