How to enable logging in your Jira plugin

Background

In one of our earlier post we saw how to create a Jira cloud plugin -

• Creating an addon for Jira Cloud with Atlassian Connect

You can similarly create a plugin for Jira server. Though these tutorials can help you develop the plugin what I felt inadequate is documentation around logging. Logging is very important in any code you write. It helps you understand the flow and find the issues in case it arises. In this post we will see how logging works for Jira.

How to enable logging in your Jira plugin

Jira uses log4j for runtime logging so you do not have to do anything out of the box to set the logging framework. If you are using atlassian sdk you can straight away start using slf4j logging in your code (It will use log4j underneath). A sample example could be -

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

public class MyClass {
    private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(MyClass.class);

    public void myMethod() {
        ...
        log.info("Log a message here");
        ...
    }
}

And that's it you can see those logs in your log file. Log file is located at following location -

• <your_addon_dir>/target/jira/home/log

You should see multiple log files like -

-rw-rw-r--  1 athakur athakur       0 Dec 27 14:31 atlassian-greenhopper.log
-rw-rw-r--  1 athakur athakur 1248201 Dec 29 00:40 atlassian-jira.log
-rw-rw-r--  1 athakur athakur    2558 Dec 29 00:39 atlassian-jira-security.log
-rw-rw-r--  1 athakur athakur     223 Dec 27 14:33 atlassian-jira-slow-queries.log
-rw-rw-r--  1 athakur athakur   18217 Dec 28 18:39 atlassian-servicedesk.log

Jira plugin logs should be part of  atlassian-jira.log file.

Logging levels

There are five logging levels available in log4j: 

'DEBUG', 'INFO', 'WARN', 'ERROR' and 'FATAL'. Each logging level provides more logging information that the level before it:

• 'DEBUG'
• 'INFO'
• 'WARN'
• 'ERROR'
• 'FATAL'

'DEBUG' provides the most verbose logging and 'FATAL' provides the least verbose logging. The default level is WARN, meaning warnings and errors are displayed. Sometimes it is useful to adjust this level to see more detail.

(Logging and profiling)

You can see these configurations in a file called log4j.properties. Localtion of this file is -

• <your-addon-dir>/target/jira/webapp/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties

In this file you should see a line saying -

# To turn more verbose logging on - change "WARN" to "DEBUG"
log4j.rootLogger=WARN, console, filelog, cloudAppender

Just change the WARN to DEBUG if you want to see debug logs.


Alternatively you can temporarily change the debug level or add a new log level for a particular package using Jira admin console. Go to System -> Logging and profiling

Here you can see default logger set to warn. You can change this to debug or add a new package with corresponding log level.

Again note changes done from this admin console are temporary and do not persist over server restarts. To make permanent changes you need to edit file -
<your-addon-dir>/target/jira/webapp/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties

Related Links

• Create a HelloWorld plugin project 
• Creating an addon for Jira Cloud with Atlassian Connect(OSFG)
• Logging and profiling