How to enable access log in Apache Tomcat?

Solution Verified - Updated

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Web Server (EWS)
  • Red Hat JBoss Web Server (JWS)
  • Apache Tomcat
    • 6.x
    • 7.x
    • 8.x
    • 9.x
    • 10.x

Issue

  • How to enable access log in Apache Tomcat?
  • How to customize the access log format?
  • How to enable friendly access log times in Apache Tomcat?

Resolution

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This solution is part of the [Master] Configuring Access Logs in Red Hat Middleware Products..

To enable access logs in Tomcat, locate the following piece of code in Tomcat's server.xml file.

<!--
<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve"
       prefix="localhost_access_log." suffix=".log"
       pattern="common" directory="${jboss.server.home.dir}/log"
       resolveHosts="false" />
-->

Remove the comment tag <!-- and -->and change the pattern="common" to the following pattern:

<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve"
       prefix="localhost_access_log." suffix=".log"
       pattern="%h %l %u %t %r %s %b Cookie: %{COOKIE}i Set-Cookie: %{SET-COOKIE}o Thread: %I TimeTaken: %T"
       directory="${jboss.server.home.dir}/log"
       resolveHosts="false" />

Daily log rotation is enabled by default. If deleting access logs is a requirement, add the maxDays attribute to indicate how many days are to be kept. This attribute is added in Content from bz.apache.org is not included.Tomcat 7.0.76+ so it would be available and supported on RHEL 8+ or JWS 5+ provided Tomcat distributions.

For more information about the available attributes on the AccessLogValve, refer to Tomcat's documentation:

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