How to rotate Confluence logs overnight and adding date to the filename
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Purpose
This article explains how to rotate Confluence Application logs overnight and add the date to the filename configured in the log4j.properties file.
Solution
Confluence uses Apache's log4j logging service. This allows administrators to control the logging behaviour and the log output file.
The logging behaviour for Confluence and Synchrony is defined in the following properties file which is a standard log4j configuration file, as described in the Apache log4j documentation. In our case, this file is located at <CONFLUENCE_INSTALL_HOME>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties
Customizing Log Rotation
To rotate the log file overnight and add the date to the filename of the logs, the below changes can be done in the log4j.properties file.
In the example below, it is covered how to modify Confluence application logs ( atlassian-confluence.log ). Similarly, the log4j appender can be modified for other log files like Synchrony logs ( atlassian-synchrony.log ), Security( atlassian-confluence-security.log ), Indexing logs( atlassian-confluence-index.log ) or any other logs configured.
To achieve this, edit the log4j.properties file as:
#log4j.appender.confluencelog=com.atlassian.confluence.logging.ConfluenceHomeLogAppender
# Comment the above line and uncomment the following 2 lines if you want to log to a specific location
#log4j.appender.confluencelog=org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.confluencelog.File=[Path_for_logs]/atlassian-confluence.log
#log4j.appender.confluencelog.LogFileName=atlassian-confluence.log
log4j.appender.confluencelog=org.apache.log4j.DailyRollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.confluencelog.DatePattern='.'yyyy-MM-dd
log4j.appender.confluencelog.Threshold=DEBUG
#log4j.appender.confluencelog.MaxFileSize=20480KB
#log4j.appender.confluencelog.MaxBackupIndex=5
log4j.appender.confluencelog.layout=com.atlassian.confluence.util.PatternLayoutWithContext
log4j.appender.confluencelog.layout.ConversionPattern=%d %p [%t] [%c{4}] %M %enc{%m}{JSON}%nDatePattern
In the above code, DailyRollingFileAppender is a log4j appender which will rotate the file daily on the basis of the DatePattern configured.
Below are some of the possible DatePatterns in log4j which can be configured to roll log files accordingly:
| Date Pattern | Rolling Schedule |
|---|---|
| '.'yyyy-MM | Rollover at the beginning of each month |
| '.'yyyy-ww | Rollover on the first day of each week. The first day of the week depends on the locale. |
| '.'yyyy-MM-dd | Rollover at midnight each day. |
| '.'yyyy-MM-dd-a | Rollover at midnight and midday of each day. |
| '.'yyyy-MM-dd-HH | Rollover at the top of every hour. |
| '.'yyyy-MM-dd-HH-mm | Rollover at the beginning of every minute. |