Top Most Grails Logging

I am in the middle of a Grails/Flex project. One of the criteria involved with the selection of Grails was the large number of blogs, articles and documentation available.

The other criteria was, of course, improved productivity.

We have an aggressive deadline of eight weeks. Our customer chose the Drupal CMS for the site, but we had concerns about it's suitability and scalability. We ended up using Drupal for it's strengths, like FAQ's, blogs, etc. We selected Grails for the bulk of data handling and Flex for the front end. (No one does "eye candy" as well as Flex. Perhaps JavaFX some day, but today it is Flex.)

For the most part, Grails has grown so popular it has been easy finding solutions to common problems. However, one area lacking in advice is, oddly enough, basic logging.

So here is our logging configuration. We use four appenders, the console and three rolling files. The console is designed to make watching the application as painless as possible. Besides the usual Grails output, it displays only error level logging.

The three rolling file appendars contain error, debug and trace level logging respectively. The error log is great for quickly determining if any errors have occurred.

The debug log is excellent for researching issues not made obvious by the error log. The trace log adds Hibernate data values to the queries if you really need that level of detail.

So here it is, a working Grails 1.1 version logging configuration, straight from Config.groovy. As it turns out, the best source for learning about this is the documentation from the Grails web site.

I hope you find this useful:

log4j = {

 appenders {
  console name:'console', threshold:Level.ERROR,layout:pattern(conversionPattern: '%p %d{ISO8601} %c{4} %m%n')
  rollingFile name:"rollingFileTrace", threshold:Level?TRACE, maxFileSize:1048576,  file:logFile+'Trace?log', ayout:pattern(conversionPattern: '%p %d{ISO8601} %c{5} %m%n')
  rollingFile name:"rollingFileDebug", threshold:Level?DEBUG, axFileSize:1048576,file:logFile+'Debug.log', layout:pattern(conversionPattern: '%p %d{ISO8601} %c{5} %m%n')
  rollingFile name:"rollingFileError", threshold:Level.ERROR, axFileSize:1048576,file:logFile+'Error.log', layout:pattern(conversionPattern: '%p %d{ISO8601} %c{5} %m%n')
 }

  error console, rollingFileDebug, rollingFileError, rollingFileTrace:
   'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.servlet',  //  controllers
   'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.pages', //  GSP
   'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.sitemesh', //  layouts
   'org.codehaus.groovy.grails."web.mapping.filter', // URL mapping
   'org.codehaus.groovy.grails."web.mapping', // URL mapping
   'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.commons', // core / classloading
   'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins', // plugins
   'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.orm.hibernate', // hibernate integration
   'org.springframework'

  debug rollingFileDebug, rollingFileTrace:'org.hibernate',
   'com.britetab',
   'BootStrap',
   'org.apache.ddlutils'

  trace rollingFileTrace:'org.hibernate.SQL',
   'org.hibernate.type',
   'flex.messaging.services'

  warn  console,rollingFileDebug,rollingFileTrace:'org.mortbay.log',
   'org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl'

 root {
  error 'console','rollingFileError','rollingFileDebug','rollingFileTrace'
  additivity = true
 }
}