How to Configure Environment-Specific Logging Behavior with Spring Boot

Code Example

This article is accompanied by working example code on github.

In the Tip Use a Human-Readable Logging Format, I proposed to use a human-readable logging format so that we can quickly scan a log to find the information we need. However, a human-readable logging format may not be needed or even desirable in every runtime environment.

We definitely want a human-readable logging format when we’re working on our local machine. But in a staging environment we might want to log to a log server instead, which may need a completely different set of logging configurations.

Spring Profiles

To differentiate between our runtime environments, we make use of Spring Profiles.

When starting our application, we can define which profile should be active by specifying the spring.profiles.active environment variable or adding the parameter --spring.profiles.active=... to the command line when starting the JAR.

Depending on this profile, we want to modify the logging behavior of the application.

Let’s say we have two profiles: dev and staging.

While developing on our local machine, we use the dev profile and want to have a nice, human-readable log format.

When the application is deployed to our staging environment, we want a CSV format instead of a human-readable format, because we have configured some fancy log slurper that reads the logs from the console, parses them and publishes them somewhere else for later reference.

Using Profiles in logback-spring.xml

When using Logback as our logging framework Spring Boot allows to define a file named logback-spring.xml. This replaces the normal logback.xml in the resources folder and allows us to use some fancy templating features to modify the content depending on certain parameters.

The above requirements can be achieved with this configuration:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>

  <springProfile name="dev">
    <appender name="CONSOLE" class="ch.qos.logback.core.ConsoleAppender">
      <encoder>
        <pattern>
          %d{HH:mm:ss.SSS} | %5p | %logger{25} | %m%n
        </pattern>
        <charset>utf8</charset>
      </encoder>
    </appender>

    <root level="DEBUG">
      <appender-ref ref="CONSOLE"/>
    </root>
  </springProfile>

  <springProfile name="staging">
    <appender name="CONSOLE" class="ch.qos.logback.core.ConsoleAppender">
      <encoder>
        <pattern>
          %d{yyyy-MM-dd};%d{HH:mm:ss.SSS};%t;%5p;%logger{25};%m%n
        </pattern>
        <charset>utf8</charset>
      </encoder>
    </appender>

    <root level="DEBUG">
      <appender-ref ref="CONSOLE"/>
    </root>
  </springProfile>

</configuration>

Using <springProfile>, we can distinguish between different profiles. When the appplication runs in the dev profile, it logs with a human-readable pattern. In the staging profile, it logs some more data, separated by “;” characters.

Provide a Default Behavior

Using the above configuration, we must specify one of the two available profiles when starting the application. Otherwise, we would get no log output at all (see LoggingWithoutProfileTest in the github repo).

If we want to provide a default behavior, we can add another <springProfile> section that is used when none of the valid profiles is matching.

<springProfile name="!dev,!staging">
  ...
</springProfile>

Conclusion

Using Logback with Spring Boot, we can make us of Spring’s Profile feature and create a logging configuration for each profile.

This could be used to define a different logging format or a different logging destination for each profile, for example.