Spring Boot has no mandatory logging dependency, except for the Commons Logging API, of
which there are many implementations to choose from. To use Logback,
you need to include it and jcl-over-slf4j
(which implements the Commons Logging API) on
the classpath. The simplest way to do that is through the starters, which all depend on
spring-boot-starter-logging
. For a web application, you need only
spring-boot-starter-web
, since it depends transitively on the logging starter. If you
use Maven, the following dependency adds logging for you:
<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId> </dependency>
Spring Boot has a LoggingSystem
abstraction that attempts to configure logging based on
the content of the classpath. If Logback is available, it is the first choice.
If the only change you need to make to logging is to set the levels of various loggers,
you can do so in application.properties
by using the "logging.level" prefix, as shown
in the following example:
logging.level.org.springframework.web=DEBUG logging.level.org.hibernate=ERROR
You can also set the location of a file to which to write the log (in addition to the console) by using "logging.file".
To configure the more fine-grained settings of a logging system, you need to use the native
configuration format supported by the LoggingSystem
in question. By default, Spring Boot
picks up the native configuration from its default location for the system (such as
classpath:logback.xml
for Logback), but you can set the location of the config file by
using the "logging.config" property.
If you put a logback.xml
in the root of your classpath, it is picked up from there (or
from logback-spring.xml
, to take advantage of the templating features provided by
Boot). Spring Boot provides a default base configuration that you can include if you
want to set levels, as shown in the following example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configuration> <include resource="org/springframework/boot/logging/logback/base.xml"/> <logger name="org.springframework.web" level="DEBUG"/> </configuration>
If you look at base.xml
in the spring-boot jar, you can see that it uses
some useful System properties that the LoggingSystem
takes care of creating for you:
${PID}
: The current process ID.${LOG_FILE}
: Whether logging.file
was set in Boot’s external configuration.${LOG_PATH}
: Whether logging.path
(representing a directory for
log files to live in) was set in Boot’s external configuration.${LOG_EXCEPTION_CONVERSION_WORD}
: Whether logging.exception-conversion-word
was set
in Boot’s external configuration.Spring Boot also provides some nice ANSI color terminal output on a console (but not in
a log file) by using a custom Logback converter. See the default base.xml
configuration
for details.
If Groovy is on the classpath, you should be able to configure Logback with
logback.groovy
as well. If present, this setting is given preference.
If you want to disable console logging and write output only to a file, you need a custom
logback-spring.xml
that imports file-appender.xml
but not console-appender.xml
, as
shown in the following example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configuration> <include resource="org/springframework/boot/logging/logback/defaults.xml" /> <property name="LOG_FILE" value="${LOG_FILE:-${LOG_PATH:-${LOG_TEMP:-${java.io.tmpdir:-/tmp}}/}spring.log}"/> <include resource="org/springframework/boot/logging/logback/file-appender.xml" /> <root level="INFO"> <appender-ref ref="FILE" /> </root> </configuration>
You also need to add logging.file
to your application.properties
, as shown in the
following example:
logging.file=myapplication.log
Spring Boot supports Log4j 2 for logging
configuration if it is on the classpath. If you use the starters for
assembling dependencies, you have to exclude Logback and then include log4j 2
instead. If you do not use the starters, you need to provide (at least) jcl-over-slf4j
in addition to Log4j 2.
The simplest path is probably through the starters, even though it requires some jiggling with excludes. The following example shows how to set up the starters in Maven:
<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter</artifactId> <exclusions> <exclusion> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-logging</artifactId> </exclusion> </exclusions> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-log4j2</artifactId> </dependency>
![]() | Note |
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The Log4j starters gather together the dependencies for common logging
requirements (such as having Tomcat use |
In addition to its default XML configuration format, Log4j 2 also supports YAML and JSON configuration files. To configure Log4j 2 to use an alternative configuration file format, add the appropriate dependencies to the classpath and name your configuration files to match your chosen file format, as shown in the following example:
Format | Dependencies | File names |
---|---|---|
YAML |
|
|
JSON |
|
|