Welcome to Apache Portals Applications Logging

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Apache Portals Applications Logging, (APA Logging), is a utility library used to setup and deploy logging configuration properties for portlet and portal web applications. APA Logging is currently used by all APA web applications and the Jetspeed 2 portal to initialize the internal Log4j logging implementations. This approach is independent of APA and Jetspeed 2 and can be used stand alone in any application container. The following containers are supported:

  • Tomcat 5.5
  • Tomcat 6
The community is encouraged to contribute utilities to support other platforms.

Overview

APA Logging utilities manage and provide a system property, org.apache.portals.logdir, that can be used by deployed web applications to collocate logs in a centralized location external to the web application itself. The utilities include an application web container listener to set the property globally before web applications are started and tools to automate the configuration of this listener.

Log4j Web Application Configuration

Any logging solution can be used with APA Logging that can be configured using the org.apache.portals.logdir system property. Log4j is used internally by most of the APA portlet applications and Jetspeed 2. Here is and example Log4j configuration, (log4j.properties), that leverages these utilities: 

            
# root logger
log4j.rootLogger = ERROR, pa

# portlet application category
log4j.category.org.apache.portals = INFO, pa
log4j.additivity.org.apache.portals = false

# portlet application APA Logging log file
log4j.appender.pa = org.apache.log4j.FileAppender
log4j.appender.pa.file = ${org.apache.portals.logdir}/my-pa.log
log4j.appender.pa.layout = org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.pa.layout.conversionPattern = %d [%t] %-5p %c - %m%n
log4j.appender.pa.append = false
To prevent potential log file overwriting and/or truncation, only one portlet web application should write to an individual file. By convention, web applications should prefix log file names with their deployed context name.

Manual Configuration

Since the APA Logging approach depends only on a global system property, manual configuration that does not utilize these utilities is possible in most web application container environments. For Tomcat, one can specify system properties on the command line or in the CATALINA_OPTS environment variable using the standard JVM syntax: 

            
-Dorg.apache.portals.logdir=/var/log/portal

Tomcat Listener

The Tomcat listener implementation, LoggingPropertiesServerListener, uses the catalina.base or catalina.home system properties to locate the Tomcat logs directory by default. The listener can also be instantiated with the logdir attribute to specify the APA Logging property value. To use the default Tomcat logs directory, the following tag must be inserted in the Server, Service, or Engine configurations in the Tomcat server.xml file: 

            
<Listener className="org.apache.portals.applications.logging.tomcat.LoggingPropertiesServerListener"/>
To specify an APA Logging directory, the following can also be used: 
            
<Listener className="org.apache.portals.applications.logging.tomcat.LoggingPropertiesServerListener" logdir="/var/log/portal"/>
The listener only configures the property if not already set, so manual configuration of the logging system property will override computed or specified by the listener. The APA Logging jar artifact must be installed in the Tomcat system library classpath, (i.e. in server/lib for Tomcat 5.5 and lib for Tomcat 6), since the listener is invoked by Tomcat itself.

Tomcat Deployment

The Tomcat deployment tool, ServerXMLConfigurer, deploys the default APA Logging Listener tag into the server.xml file. The tool is used as part of the Jetspeed 2 deployment Maven2 plugin, (jetspeed-deploy-maven-plugin), to provide a self configuring development and demo environment. As noted above, this results in all APA Logging compatible log files being located in the standard Tomcat installation logs directory.

The deployment tool checks to ensure the listener has not already been installed and/or configured before running. The Listener tag is inserted within the Engine tag. Tomcat installation configurations with multiple Engine tags should be configured manually to ensure proper operation.