Hi.
This is a humble request to the Tomcat developers.
First an introduction :
This is a mailing list dedicated to helping people use Tomcat, and by extension java
webapps and java itself. So it is normal that an overwhelming number of the people who
are accessing this list and its archives would be java and java webapp developers, for
which some of the things I mention below will sound like the ABC of the business.
But Tomcat also has another class of users : the thousands of sysadmins who set up and
keep running "bare Tomcats", and allow all these great Tomcat-based webapps to run.
From such a sysadmin's point of view, Tomcat (and all its webapps), is one application
which runs on a server, among tens or hundreds of them.
A part of a sysadmin's job is usually to keep these applications running, which includes
seeing to it that their logfiles can be easily found, allow the diagnosis of a problem
when it occurs, but also that they do not fill the disk and ultimately prevent other
things from running.
There are many applications, on sometimes many systems, to be configured and monitored in
this way, so that anything which generally makes that task easier is very welcome.
For example, a utility such as logrotate, in the sysadmin world, is like a gift
of God.
Most server-like programs allow logrotate to rotate their logfiles, compress old ones,
remove even older ones, etc. to keep things running smoothly over time.
It's a simple thing, but it saves many hours that would otherwise have to be dedicated to
monitoring and reacting to such repetitive occurrences.
Tomcat, at this moment, does not really allow that.
That is because there is no simple mechanism to tell Tomcat to relinquish control of its
current logfiles for a moment, short of stopping Tomcat completely and restarting it
(which interrupts the service, sometimes for a significant amount of time).
To this there will probably be a number of answers indicating that Tomcat's Juli or log4j
or whatever already provide ways to achieve this.
I don't want to get into the debate consisting of deciding whether it should be the
developer of an application, or the sysadmin who runs it, who ultimately decides what an
application is logging and where it does it.
But the thing is that these tens of thousands of sysadmins do not necessarily want to
learn java, or learn the intricacies ot Tomcat, or even learn how to configure and setup
Juli or log4j, just for the sake of this one Tomcat application among many running on
their systems.
So my request is simple (at least to express) : can someone among the Tomcat luminaries
not imagine a mechanism by which Tomcat would, on request from an external program or
script, do something like the Apache httpd does during a "soft reload" : wait for the
current requests to terminate, close all logfiles and re-open them ?
For example : there already exist a "shutdown port", and a bunch of "Listeners". Could
there not be a "logs rotate port" or a "logrotate listener" ?
I am not underestimating the possible difficulty of the task, and probably tackling such
an issue is ultimately less rewarding for a developer than implementing the latest in
webapp or HTTP technology.
But many sysadmins worldwide would be grateful if this came to pass and I am sure that it
would do a great deal to increase the popularity of Tomcat among them.
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