Tinylog - Simple example with Rolling File Writer

Created: 2021-01-26 | 4 min

This is a simple example of how to configure a Rolling File Writer with Tinylog.

#Steps

#Requirements

#Create a java application

Create the pom.xml and add the two dependencies required to work with Tinylog.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>com.ckinan</groupId>
    <artifactId>tinylog</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>

    <properties>
        <java.version>1.8</java.version>
        <maven.compiler.source>1.8</maven.compiler.source>
        <maven.compiler.target>1.8</maven.compiler.target>
    </properties>

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.tinylog</groupId>
            <artifactId>tinylog-api</artifactId>
            <version>2.2.1</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.tinylog</groupId>
            <artifactId>tinylog-impl</artifactId>
            <version>2.2.1</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

</project>

Create a java class, I'll name it App.java with a main method that will just log a Hello World (for now).

package com.ckinan;

import org.tinylog.Logger;

public class App {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Logger.info("Hello world");
    }

}

Run the App class, you should see this in your console:

2021-01-26 17:37:28 [main] com.ckinan.App.main()
INFO: Hello world

Ok, so far we just wrote almost the same setup from the Getting Started documentation. Now, let's configure the Rolling File Writer.

#Setup a Rolling File Writer

Create a file tinylog.properties in src/main/resources:

writer          = rolling file
writer.file     = log/app_{count}.log

Run the App class, you should see:

  1. A new folder created by Tinylog in the root path of your java application ./log
  2. A log file created by Tinylog located in ./log/app_0.log
  3. The content of the log file should be our Hello World:
2021-01-26 17:59:44 [main] com.ckinan.App.main()
INFO: Hello world
  1. If you run the java application a second time, a new log file will be created, this time with name ./log/app_1.log.

That's expected because with our initial configuration in tinylog.properties it's taking default values about how new log entries will be written in the log files. However, we can customize the way these log files are created, their format, and policies. We will do that in a bit.

Ok, so far we created the Rolling File Writer with just the required properties in it. Now, let's customize our writer so that we can see a bit more what we can do with it.

#Customize our Rolling File Writer

Let's we have the following needs:

All the above information (and more) can be achieved by the logging configuration that Tinylog provides. For more details about this configuration, go to https://tinylog.org/v2/configuration.

In order to meet the said criteria, let's update our tinylog.properties file:

writer          = rolling file
writer.level    = info
writer.format   = {date: yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS} {pid}/{thread-id} {class}:{line} {level}: {message}
writer.file     = log/app_{count}.log
writer.charset  = UTF-8
writer.policies = size: 50KB
writer.backups  = 5
writer.append   = true

Also, let's update our java application to print more entries in the log, so that the log files can be rotated:

package com.ckinan;

import org.tinylog.Logger;

public class App {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        for(int i=0; i<6000; i++) {
            Logger.info(i);
        }
    }

}

Run the App class, you should see:

  1. Five files with maximum 50KB of size per each. We intentionally forced to create six files so that we can see that

app_0.log and app_1.log log files where removed given our configuration to have maximum 5 log files as backup.

$ ls -l ./log
total 512
drwxr-xr-x  7 ckinan  staff   224B Jan 26 20:41 .
drwxr-xr-x  9 ckinan  staff   288B Jan 26 20:41 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 ckinan  staff    50K Jan 26 20:41 app_2.log
-rw-r--r--  1 ckinan  staff    50K Jan 26 20:41 app_3.log
-rw-r--r--  1 ckinan  staff    50K Jan 26 20:41 app_4.log
-rw-r--r--  1 ckinan  staff    50K Jan 26 20:41 app_5.log
-rw-r--r--  1 ckinan  staff    45K Jan 26 20:41 app_6.log
  1. Log entries should show our custom date format, the process id, thread name, class name and line number. All that

according to the format we specified in tinylog.properties under writer.format.

2021-01-26 20:41:45.708 2990/1 com.ckinan.App:9 INFO: 1754

#Final thoughts

When it comes to initial setup, I found Tinylog very easy to follow. Their Getting Started guide shows all what I needed (dependencies, requirements and the "Hello World"). Later, when I had to setup the log files rotation, the documentation was also pretty clear on what I needed. I found this logging framework while working on a side project and I feel it was an excellent choice because of its simplicity to cover all my needs regarding what I could do with the Rolling File Writer.