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Logging

This section describes how to use the geonetwork log files to find more details on incidents.

Customising the log file location

The default log file location is logs/geonetwork.log (with backups created geonetwork-1.log, geonetwork-2.log,...).

It is possible to change the directory where these log files are generated with a Java system property log_dir. The Java System property log_dir is the name of a directory, and does not end with a /.

For the example -Dlog_dir=/var/tomcat/logs the files will be created in /var/tomcat/logs/geonetwork.log, and will rotate through the filenames /var/tomcat/logs/geonetwork-1.log,/var/tomcat/logs/geonetwork-2.log,...

To set the log_dir property, you can add it to the JAVA_OPTS in the startup script of your servlet container. For example, if you are using Tomcat, you can add it to the setenv.sh or setenv.bat file in the bin directory of your Tomcat installation.

Details of some errors, such as XSL transformation errors, are not written to geonetwork.log. They are written to a file called catalina.out (if using Tomcat).

Setting the Loglevel

GeoNetwork by default has 4 log levels: PROD, INDEX, SEARCH, DEV.

  • PROD is the default option, it will only log critical errors.
  • INDEX is similar to PROD, but with extended logging around the indexation process.
  • Search is similar to PROD, but with extended logging around the search process.
  • DEV is the most extended level, all debug messages will be logged.

You can set the log level from the Admin → Settings page.

Log4j

GeoNetwork uses Apache log4j for logging. The log4j configuration files are located in the /WEB-INF/classes directory of the GeoNetwork web application: /WEB-INF/classes/log4j2.xml, /WEB-INF/classes/log4j2-dev.xml and /WEB-INF/classes/log4j2-index.xml. The configuration file configures for each debug level at what severity messages will be logged.

The file used is determined by the log level set in the Admin → Settings page.