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gav
Asked: 2010-03-31 04:20:51 +0800 CST

Where are my Tomcat Logs?

  • 772

I installed Tomcat6 on a Ubuntu 9.04 server using apt-get install tomcat6. I uploaded a WAR using the manager interface and tried to start the application but get a pretty generic error on the Web interface saying it couldn't be started.

I am trying to find the logs to determine why my war won't start (I suspect low memory as i'm on a small VPS) but I don't know where they are.

/var/lib/tomcat6/logs is empty. My Tomcat splash page reliably informs me of the following;

Tomcat is installed with CATALINA_HOME in /usr/share/tomcat6 
CATALINA_BASE in /var/lib/tomcat6, 
following the rules from /usr/share/doc/tomcat6-common/RUNNING.txt.gz.

UPDATE

I tried running;

$ ps -ax 
/usr/bin/jsvc -user tomcat6 -cp /usr/share/java/commons-daemon.jar:/usr/share/tomcat6/bin/bootstrap.jar -outfile SYSLOG -errfile SYSLOG -pidfile /var/run/tomcat6.pid

But there is nothing in /var/log/syslog

Also runing

$ losof -p PID

didn't show any log files...

$  for PID in $(pgrep jsvc);do sudo ls -l /proc/$PID/fd|grep ' 1 -> ';done
l-wx------ 1 root 500 64 2010-03-30 13:29 1 -> pipe:[301470406]
lrwx------ 1 root 500 64 2010-03-30 13:29 1 -> /dev/null
l-wx------ 1 root root 64 2010-03-30 13:29 1 -> pipe:[301470406]

Thanks,

Gav

tomcat ubuntu ubuntu-9.04 tomcat6

6 Answers

  1. A neat trick is to run the command "lsof -p PID" where PID is the process id of your tomcat server. This command will give you a list of all files opened by the process, including the log file. See Wikipedia page.

    • 39

  2. By default check 

    /var/log/tomcat6/catalina.out

    or something like that

    and check logging properties in

    /usr/share/tomcat6/conf/logging.properties

    usually /usr/share/tomcat6/conf/ is symbolic link to /etc/tomcat6/

    • 25

  3. They should be at CATALINA_HOME/logs

    I've seen it most often at /opt/tomcat/logs, but in your case it might be /usr/share/logs

    • 8
  4. Best Answer

    Very late to this discussion, but it appears that the 03catalina.policy file in both tomcat5.5 & tomcat6 doesn't actually permit writing to logfiles.

    The simplest solution is to change the JULI permissions to:

    // These permissions apply to JULI
grant codeBase "file:${catalina.home}/bin/tomcat-juli.jar" {
    permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

    Obviously, there may be security issues I'm not aware of, but I really can't be bothered to dig deeper - I've spent too long on this myself.

    • 8

  5. By default Tomcat logs are in /var/log/tomcat? and /var/lib/tomcat7/logs usually points to there.

    As root, you may check them by:

    tail -f /var/log/tomcat7/*.log /var/log/tomcat7/*.txt /var/log/tomcat7/*.out

    If you still have any issues, try finding them via:

    sudo lsof | grep -E "java.*(out|txt|log)$"
    • 2

  6. we can find logs like below for Windows. C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 9.0\logs

    also refer C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 9.0\conf\logging-properties.

    • 1