How to enable Fediz Plugin Logging

If you are using the Apache Fediz plugin to enable WS-Federation Support for your Tomcat container, you will not see any log statements from the Fediz Plugin by default. Especially when testing or analyzing issues with the plugin you will be interested in actually seeing some log statements from the plugin.

In this blog post I'll explain to you what need to be done to get all DEBUG log level statements from the Apache Fediz Tomcat Plugin using Log4J.
Apache Tomcat tells you how to enable logging on the container level.

1. Adding Dependencies

First you need to ensure that the required libraries are available within your classpath. This can be done in one of two ways:

a) Adding Maven Dependencies to the Fediz Tomcat Plugin

Add the following dependency to cxf-fediz/plugins/tomcat7/pom.xml:

<project . . .>
 . . .
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupid>org.slf4j</groupid>
            <artifactid>slf4j-log4j12</artifactid>
            <version>${slf4j.version}</version>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
 . . .
</project>

Now build the plugin again mvn clean package and deploy the content of cxf-fediz/plugins/tomcat7/target/fediz-tomcat7-1.3.0-zip-with-dependencies.zip into your tomcat/lib/fediz folder.

b) Adding lib files directly to your lib folder

Add slf4j and log4j libs (in the desired version) to your fediz plugin dependencies:

2. Adding Log4J configuration file

Once your dependencies are added to your Tomcat installation, you need to add a log4j.properties file to your tomcat/lib folder. Here is an example content for this file:

# Loggers
log4j.rootLogger = WARN, CATALINA, CONSOLE
log4j.logger.org.apache.cxf.fediz = DEBUG, CONSOLE, FEDIZ
log4j.additivity.org.apache.cxf.fediz = false

# Appenders
log4j.appender.CATALINA = org.apache.log4j.DailyRollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.CATALINA.File = ${catalina.base}/logs/catalina.out
log4j.appender.CATALINA.Append = true
log4j.appender.CATALINA.Encoding = UTF-8
log4j.appender.CATALINA.DatePattern = '.'yyyy-MM-dd
log4j.appender.CATALINA.layout = org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.CATALINA.layout.ConversionPattern = %d [%t] %-5p %c %x - %m%n

log4j.appender.FEDIZ = org.apache.log4j.DailyRollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.FEDIZ.File = ${catalina.base}/logs/fediz-plugin.log
log4j.appender.FEDIZ.Append = true
log4j.appender.FEDIZ.Encoding = UTF-8
log4j.appender.FEDIZ.Threshold = DEBUG
log4j.appender.FEDIZ.DatePattern = '.'yyyy-MM-dd
log4j.appender.FEDIZ.layout = org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.FEDIZ.layout.ConversionPattern = %d [%t] %-5p %c %x - %m%n

log4j.appender.CONSOLE = org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.CONSOLE.Encoding = UTF-8
log4j.appender.CONSOLE.Threshold = INFO
log4j.appender.CONSOLE.layout = org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.CONSOLE.layout.ConversionPattern = %d [%t] %-5p %c %x - %m%n

Now restart your tomcat container and you will see Fediz Info logs on your console and Debug messages within tomcat/logs/fediz-plugin.log.