[Building Sakai] runtime config of log4j

[Matthew Jones]

Hi John,

I would occasionally use a jsp to change the log levels, I think it was
this one:
https://gist.github.com/943918

The issue with that was I never made it "sakai protected" behind the
requestfilter so I'd just use it on development servers. Your webservice is
an interesting idea, but I think at many schools, operations still wouldn't
want any administrator on the server to be able to change log levels
whenever they want.

The compromise we found useful at Michigan was to add a JMX that can be
used to change the log level.
https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/umich/logjmxservice/

This needed to be on 2.7.x or 2.8 because the log4j in earlier versions was
too old, but probably could just be dropped into core. It was pretty useful
and let operations keep pesky developers out of these settings while still
letting us adjust them when we really needed.

Now if developers would just add more debug logging in places where it
really could be useful!

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 1:11 AM, John Bush <john.bush at rsmart.com> wrote:

> this is bad ass, if you didn't know it you can change log levels at
> runtime.  Add this to your SakaiScript.jws
>
>   public String adjustLogLevel(String sessionid, String packageName,
> String level) throws AxisFault {
>       Session session = establishSession(sessionid);
>       if (!securityService.isSuperUser()) {
>           LOG.warn("NonSuperUser trying to collect configuration: "
> + session.getUserId());
>           throw new AxisFault("NonSuperUser trying to collect
> configuration: " + session.getUserId());
>       }
>       Properties props = new Properties();
>       try {
>
>           // ok, yes I know this is fragile and totally tomcat
> specific, but it works and avoids having to
>           // configure up a new version of the log4j file somehow.
> For sure this will break in tomcat 6, as
>           // I think classloading is much different there.
>           // This finds the log4j file in kernel common:
>           // common/lib/sakai-kernel-common-x.x.x.jar!/log4j.properties
>           InputStream configStream =
>
> this.getClass().getClassLoader().getParent().getParent().getParent().getResourceAsStream("log4j.properties");
>           props.load(configStream);
>           configStream.close();
>           props.setProperty("log4j.logger." + packageName, level);
>           LogManager.resetConfiguration();
>           PropertyConfigurator.configure(props);
>       } catch (Exception e) {
>           e.printStackTrace();
>       }
>
>       return "success";
>   }
>
> The call the webservice via a browser or however you like to do that
> (using an active sessionid of course):
>
>
> http://localhost:8888/sakai-axis/SakaiScript.jws?method=adjustLogLevel&sessionid=9a17024e-7430-4d69-998e-83a6f7d35cab&packageName=org.springframework&level=DEBUG
>
> and viola you can adjust log level at runtime.   Pretty sweet.
>
> Try it out.
>
> --
> John Bush
> 602-490-0470
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