How to manage log4j.properties file?

mschroder
Valued Contributor

Dear experts,

I wonder how I am supposed to manage/maintain the log4j.properties file. I had noticed that our production servers don't have a JSSAccess.log. After some digging I saw that their log4j.properties don't have any entry for that file, so I thought I take over the log4j.properties from our test servers which happily write to JSSAccess.log.

Looking at the log4j.properties on the test servers I see

! Warning! Changes made to this file will not necessarily make it into customer's JSS
! instances, as some installers will overwrite the log4j.properties file

Now I am puzzled. Apparently the last install did not touch the log4j file on the production servers, so I have to correct this. But will the next JSS update leave the file alone? Will it revert it? Will it add new things?

It really depends on the behaviour of the JSS installer / updater whether I do a manual correction now, or whether I implement something for our config management system that ensures that after a re-install or an update I have the contents of log4j that I want.

So how do you handle log4j.properties?

Cheers,

Matthias

1 REPLY 1

andykang
New Contributor

Hi Matthias,

Speaking from Linux installer experience, any changes made to the log4j.properties file will be carried over during an upgrade. It sounds to me like the log4j.properties file was never modified to point to the desired path. This has to be done manually. By default, this points to /Library/Logs (which is for JSS installs on macOS Server, but is the default for the Linux installer for some reason). On Linux, you will have to modify the paths to point to /usr/local/jss/logs or wherever you want them to be on your server.

If the behavior of the installer changes and your file is overwritten, a backup will be saved in /usr/local/jss/backups