Hello,
I have been using Tomcat for about 18 years. As far as I can remember,
everything that I leave on the log with System.out.println() has been found
inside the file "catalina.out" which has been nice. However, this seems to have
changed.
I just migrated to Ubuntu 20.04 + Tomcat 9.0.31, and installed Tomcat doing a
"sudo apt install tomcat9". Now I see that the file "catalina.out" never gets
created, and that everything that had been sent there is now being sent to the
Ubuntu/Linux/Debian log "syslog". I don't like that, I want to keep having a
separate/dedicated log for Tomcat (which is something I check very often) and
not havoing to search for it inside syslog (which is something I rarely
inspect).
I have done some research, and this is what I have discovered (if I understood
everything correctly):
- Tomcat now runs as a service inside something called "systemsd"
- For some reason, the people at Ubuntu/Debian/Linux decided that Tomcat's log
should be found inside syslog, instead of staying independent inside
"catalina.out". Why is that? I don't know and I don't like it!
- The other files inside /var/log/tomcat get created, including the
"catalina.YYYY-MM-DD.log" files. But I dont' find my "System.out.println()"
messages there, which has always been the case.
- I have found, however, that syslog tries to create and populate the
"catalina.out" file as well, since I have found an error inside syslog that
says something like "rsyslogd: file '/var/log/tomcat9/catalina.out': open
error: Permission denied".
- I have also found a file "/etc/rsyslog.d/tomcat9.conf" which, indeed, seams
to indicate syslog that the file "/var/log/tomcat9/catalina.out" must be
populated. Which makes sense and should solve my needs.
- Considering the "Permission denied" error message, I started playing with the
permissions (something that I really don't have much experience with). If I
remember correctly, I created the file "catalina.out" manually, and the
modified its properties so the owners are "tomcat/adm", since the "syslog"
process/user seems to be inside the "adm" group. Restarted everything... and
the "catalina.out" file got created and populated!!! So it seems that the main
obstacle here is a lack of correct permissions so syslog can do what has been
told and populate the "catalina.out" file. Did I get it right?
- However, when I delete all the log files (which I do every once in a while),
the permissions that I assigned get lost and the file doesn't get created
anymore.
What are we supposed to do to deal with this problem? Can/should we do
something so the Tomcat log doesn't go to syslog? If not, and considering that
it seems that syslog is trying to populate the "catalina.out" file as it has
been told, what should we do to correct the permissions problem?
Thanks in advance!
Brian
