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Different Log4j2 Configurations per Spring Profile
Last updated: September 16, 2021
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
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1. Overview
In our previous tutorials, Spring Profiles and Logging in Spring Boot, we showed how to activate different profiles and use Log4j2 in Spring.
In this short tutorial, we’ll learn how to use different Log4j2 configurations per Spring profile.
2. Use Different Properties Files
For example, suppose we have two files, log4j2.xml and log4j2-dev.xml, one for the default profile and the other for the “dev” profile.
Let’s create our application.properties file and tell it where to find the logging config file:
logging.config=/path/to/log4j2.xmlNext, let’s create a new properties file for our “dev” profile named application-dev.properties and add a similar line:
logging.config=/path/to/log4j2-dev.xmlIf we have other profiles – for example, “prod” – we only need to create a similarly named properties file – application-prod.properties for our “prod” profile. Profile-specific properties always override the default ones.
3. Programmatic Configuration
We can programmatically choose which Log4j2 configuration file to use by changing our Spring Boot Application class:
@SpringBootApplication
public class Application implements CommandLineRunner {
@Autowired
private Environment env;
public static void main(String[] args) {
SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
}
@Override
public void run(String... param) {
if (Arrays.asList(env.getActiveProfiles()).contains("dev")) {
Configurator.initialize(null, "/path/to/log4j2-dev.xml");
} else {
Configurator.initialize(null, "/path/to/log4j2.xml");
}
}
}Configurator is a class of the Log4j2 library. It provides several ways to construct a LoggerContext using the location of the configuration file and various optional parameters.
This solution has one drawback: The application boot process won’t be logged using Log4j2.
4. Conclusion
In summary, we’ve seen two approaches to using different Log4j2 configurations per Spring profile. First, we saw that we could provide a different properties file for each profile. Then, we saw an approach for configuring Log4j2 programmatically at application startup based on the active profile.
