[LOG4J2-1101] Date based file appender

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.8
• Component/s: Appenders
• Assignee: Ralph Goers
• Reporter: Haavar Valeur
• Created: 22/Aug/15 08:03
• Updated: 05/Mar/20 01:05
• Resolved: 15/Jan/17 21:49

Description

I'd like to reintroduce the option of logging to a file that has the current date in it.

For example, when the app starts up, it will start logging to myapp-20150821.log. At midnight, it starts logging to a new file named myapp-20150822.log.

Log4j2's RollingFileAppender does not support this. In log4j2 the file appender will log to one file with a static file name, and then the content is moved over to another file.

This used to be a feature in log4j 1.3, when using extras. I would configure it like this:

    <appender name="myapp" class="org.apache.log4j.rolling.RollingFileAppender">
        <rollingPolicy class="org.apache.log4j.rolling.TimeBasedRollingPolicy">
            <param name="FileNamePattern" value="myapp-%d{yyyyMMdd}.log"/>
        </rollingPolicy>
        ....
    </appender>

The only way I found that it would work in log4j2 is to use the following code, but that's pretty hacky:
https://gist.github.com/tomaszalusky/b9109c0faddafe099835

Issue Links

• breaks: LOG4J2-1804 Rolling file %i based rolling broken in 2.8
• is duplicated by: LOG4J2-1185 Ability to change the fileName dynamically in RollingFileAppender
• is duplicated by: LOG4J2-1223 I want set current date to "Active output target" in RollingFile.
• relates to: LOG4J2-1032 Rollover startegy failing on high load
• relates to: LOG4J2-1878 Dates in filename for RollingRandomAccessFile appender