Explicitly Setting log4j Configuration File Location

I ran into an issue recent­ly, where an exist­ing log4j.xml con­fig­u­ra­tion file was built into a jar file I was ref­er­enc­ing and I was unable to get Java to rec­og­nize anoth­er file that I want­ed it to use instead.  For­tu­nate­ly, the solu­tion to this prob­lem is fair­ly straight­for­ward and sim­ple.

I was run­ning a stand­alone appli­ca­tion in lin­ux, via a bash shell script; but this tech­nique can be used in oth­er ways too.  You sim­ply add a para­me­ter to the JVM call like the exam­ple below.

So the syn­tax is basi­cal­ly:

java -Dlog4j.configuration="file:<full path to file>" -cp <classpath settings> <package name where my main function is located>

Lets say I have a file named log4j.xml in /opt/tools/myapp/ which I want to use when my appli­ca­tion runs, instead of any exist­ing log4j.xml files.  This can be done by pass­ing a JVM flag –Dlog4j.configuration to Java.

Here is an exam­ple:

java -Dlog4j.configuration="file:/opt/tools/myapp/log4j.xml" -cp $CLASSPATH  my.standalone.mainClass;

With that change, as long as your log4j file is set up prop­er­ly, your prob­lems should be behind you.