Java – log4j configuration in EAR

You create a new project. The new project is your EAR assembly project which contains your two dependencies for your EJB project and your WAR project.

So you actually have three maven projects here. One EJB. One WAR. One EAR that pulls the two parts together and creates the ear.

Deployment descriptors can be generated by maven, or placed inside the resources directory in the EAR project structure.

The maven-ear-plugin is what you use to configure it, and the documentation is good, but not quite clear if you're still figuring out how maven works in general.

So as an example you might do something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
  <artifactId>myEar</artifactId>
  <packaging>ear</packaging>
  <name>My EAR</name>

  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
          <source>1.5</source>
          <target>1.5</target>
          <encoding>UTF-8</encoding>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
      <plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-ear-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
          <version>1.4</version>
          <modules>
            <webModule>
              <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
              <artifactId>myWar</artifactId>
              <bundleFileName>myWarNameInTheEar.war</bundleFileName>
              <contextRoot>/myWarConext</contextRoot>
            </webModule>
            <ejbModule>
              <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
              <artifactId>myEjb</artifactId>
              <bundleFileName>myEjbNameInTheEar.jar</bundleFileName>
            </ejbModule>
          </modules>
          <displayName>My Ear Name displayed in the App Server</displayName>
          <!-- If I want maven to generate the application.xml, set this to true -->
          <generateApplicationXml>true</generateApplicationXml>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
      <plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.3</version>
        <configuration>
          <encoding>UTF-8</encoding>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
    <finalName>myEarName</finalName>
  </build>

  <!-- Define the versions of your ear components here -->
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
      <artifactId>myWar</artifactId>
      <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
      <type>war</type>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
      <artifactId>myEjb</artifactId>
      <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
      <type>ejb</type>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</project>

It finds the log4j.xml using the CLASSPATH. If log4j doesn't find any config file, it will send an error to the console. If you don't see any such error then it is likely that it is finding a config file which may not be the one you are editing. There is a command-line option to force Log4J to report the path of the config file it is using.

From http://wiki.apache.org/logging-log4j/Log4jConfigurationHelp

If you run with "-Dlog4j.debug" then log4j will print out info to standard output telling how it is trying to configure itself. Looking through that will tell you where it is looking for the config file.