How to set the logfile name of Spring application and log to tomcat /logs folder?

Question

How can I set the logging path relative to tomcat dir /logs/mylog.log?

What I tried: changing the logging.file property in application.properties

leaving the filename out: #logging.file= -> everything is logged to console, thus written into tomcat/logs/localhost.yyyy-mm-dd.log

logging.file=mylog.log -> written to console, thus same as #logging.file

logging.file=d:/mylog.log -> written to the location d:/mylog.log

logging.file=../logs/mylog.log -> written to console, thus still to localhost*.log

None was successful. I'm not interested in externalising the configuration eg by providing system or environment variables.

Answer 1

I just created a simple Spring-bootapp from spring starter build as war file. I have just this modification in @SpringBootApplication class:

@SpringBootApplication
public class LogApplication {

   private static final Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(LogApplication.class);

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(LogApplication.class, args);
    }

    @Controller
    @ResponseBody
    public static class IndexController{

        @RequestMapping("/")
        public String getindex(){
            logger.error("Error Logging");
            return "Hello";
        }
    }
}

And this property in application.properties:

logging.file=../logs/mylog.log

Build the application using maven mvn clean install and put the war file inside webapps folder of tomcat. Started tomcat using startup.bat and hit successful the endpoint http://localhost:8080/demo-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.

And the log was written in logs/mylog.log:

2017-01-04 14:57:10.755 ERROR 8236 --- [http-apr-8080-exec-4] com.example.LogApplication               : Error Logging

Answer 2

You can make use of the environment variable for configuring the log path.

Tomcat sets a catalina.home system property which you can use

log4j.rootCategory=DEBUG,errorfile

log4j.appender.errorfile.File=${catalina.home}/logs/LogFilename.log

Note:-

This may not work On Debian (including Ubuntu), ${catalina.home} will not work because that points at /usr/share/tomcat6 which has no link to /var/log/tomcat6. Here just use ${catalina.base}. Check this link