Configuring logging

In the Creating a Roo project recipe, you saw that when you create a new project, a log4j.properties file is automatically created with default logging configuration. In most real projects, you'd like to customize the default logging configuration. By default, the log4j.properties file configures root logger at ERROR level and logging is not enabled for the project.

In this recipe, we will look at the logging setup command to modify the logging configuration.

Getting ready

Start the Roo shell from the C:\roo-cookbook\ch01-recipe directory, which contains the flight-app Roo project.

How to do it...

Using the logging setup command you can specify the logging level and the package to which it applies, as shown in the following steps:

1. The following logging setup commands are used to change the logging level of rootLogger to DEBUG (which is ERROR by default) and enable DEBUG level logging for all classes in the flight-app application:

   roo> logging setup --level DEBUG --package ROOT
   Updated SRC_MAIN_RESOURCES\log4j.properties
   
   roo> logging setup --level DEBUG --package PROJECT
   Updated SRC_MAIN_RESOURCES\log4j.properties
   

   As the output from the command execution suggests, some changes have been made by Roo to the log4j.properties file.

   Tip

   Keep an eye on the output of a command

   When a Roo command is executed, it displays information about what files and directories have been created or which files have been updated. This can be helpful if you want to check the code that is generated on execution of a command.

2. To confirm that the changes have been made to the log4j.properties, you can either view it directly by opening the file or you can use the properties list command (explained in the next recipe).

How it works...

The logging setup command is processed by the Logging add-on of Spring Roo. The following table describes the arguments that the logging setup command accepts:

Argument	Purpose
level	This is a mandatory argument, which identifies the logging level. It can only take one of the pre-defined values, like DEBUG, ERROR, INFO, and so on.
package	This is an optional argument, which specifies the package to which the logging level applies. It can only take one of the pre-defined values, such as PROJECT, ALL_SPRING, PERSISTENCE, and so on.

There's more...

As of Spring Roo 1.1.3, using the logging setup command you can't specify a custom package name as the value of the package argument; therefore, you can set a custom package name either by using the properties set command (explained later in this chapter) or by directly editing the log4j.properties file.

See also

• The Viewing properties defined in a properties file, Removing a property defined in a properties file, and Adding properties to a properties file recipes show how you can manage properties files in your Roo project.