Log4j, configuring a Web App to use a relative path

java, log4j, web-applications

Solution

I've finally done it in this way.

Added a ServletContextListener that does the following:

public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent event) {
    ServletContext context = event.getServletContext();
    System.setProperty("rootPath", context.getRealPath("/"));
}

Then in the log4j.properties file:

log4j.appender.file.File=${rootPath}WEB-INF/logs/MyLog.log

By doing it in this way Log4j will write into the right folder as long as you don't use it before the "rootPath" system property has been set. This means that you cannot use it from the ServletContextListener itself but you should be able to use it from anywhere else in the app.

It should work on every web container and OS as it's not dependent on a container specific system property and it's not affected by OS specific path issues. Tested with Tomcat and Orion web containers and on Windows and Linux and it works fine so far.

What do you think?

Problem

I have a java webapp that has to be deployed on either Win or Linux machines. I now want to add log4j for logging and I'd like to use a relative path for the log file as I don't want to change the file path on every deployment. The container will most likely be Tomcat but not necessarily. What's the best way of doing this?

Original source