A middle-class man's conditional logging configuration

In an earlier post I described how one adapt a single configuration file for use in development as well as production environments. At those prehistoric times, that is January 2010, logback did not support conditional (if-then-else) configuration statements. So we made use of a default substitution value to do the the trick.

However, as of version 0.9.20 (to be released early April), logback supports conditional configuration statements. Thus, we can write:

<appender name="FILE" class="ch.qos.logback.core.FileAppender">
  <if condition='!isNull("catalina.home")'>
    <then>
      <File>${catalina.home}/logs/myApp.log</File>
    </then>
    <else>
      <File>./logs/myApp.log</File>
    </else>
  </if> 
  ...
</appender>

Thus, if the "catalina.home" system property is defined (non null), then the log file will be written to ${catalina.home}/logs/myApp.log, otherwise, we are in the development environment and the logs should be written to ./logs/myApp.log.

In this particular case, the if-then-else approach is more verbose than default variable substitution, i.e. simply writing ${catalina.home:-.}. However, it goes without saying that conditional configuration brings much needed flexibility to the table. Keep in mind that given the verbosity of XML, one could gradually end up with a configuration file containing many logical branches rendering the file ungrokable. In case you ask, nested if-then-else statements are supported. So please use conditionals with moderation so that complexity does not creep into your configuration files.