Grails 2.1 disables log4j config on JBoss

Question

We recently upgraded our app from Grails 1.3.7 to 2.1, which builds under maven, and made a bunch of changes to the pom file and other config- and build-related files of grails to get things working.

Here's the issue: when our JBoss server deploys our grails war file, something appears to cause log4j to be reconfigured such that the appserver stops all logging from that point forward (for any class). The app server is still running fine, but there is no logging after this line:

INFO  [org.jboss.web.tomcat.service.deployers.TomcatDeployment] (main) deploy, ctxPath=/our-app

Removing our war file and restarting the server shows things logging correctly.

Our appserver has a server/default/conf/jboss-log4j.xml file in where we specify our cross-app log4j config.

I've tried removing log4j and slf4j jar files from our war, as that has caused issues in the past, but it hasn't solved the problem this time.

I also commented out the entire log4j section of grails-app/Config.groovy thinking that might be the culprit, but that had no effect.

I also tried removing the grails log4j plugin (by marking it as 'provided' scope in the pom), but that causes the following error during deployment:

ERROR [org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[jboss.web].[localhost].[/out-app]] (main) Error configuring application listener of class org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.log4j.web.util.Log4jConfigListener
    java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.log4j.web.util.Log4jConfigListener

Any idea what I might have missed?

An abbreviated listing of my war file is below:

WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml
WEB-INF/classes/BootStrap.class
WEB-INF/classes/BuildConfig.class
WEB-INF/classes/Config.class
WEB-INF/classes/DataSource.class
WEB-INF/classes/HibernateGrailsPlugin.class
WEB-INF/classes/UrlMappings.class
WEB-INF/classes/application.properties
WEB-INF/classes/gsp/views.properties
WEB-INF/classes/resources.class
WEB-INF/grails.xml
WEB-INF/jboss-web.xml
WEB-INF/lib/antlr-2.7.7.jar
WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/aspectjrt-1.6.10.jar
WEB-INF/lib/aspectjweaver-1.6.10.jar
WEB-INF/lib/cglib-2.2.jar
WEB-INF/lib/commons-beanutils-1.8.3.jar
WEB-INF/lib/commons-codec-1.5.jar
WEB-INF/lib/commons-collections-3.2.1.jar
WEB-INF/lib/commons-dbcp-1.4.jar
WEB-INF/lib/commons-el-1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/commons-fileupload-1.2.2.jar
WEB-INF/lib/commons-io-2.0.1.jar
WEB-INF/lib/commons-lang-2.6.jar
WEB-INF/lib/commons-pool-1.5.6.jar
WEB-INF/lib/commons-validator-1.3.1.jar
WEB-INF/lib/concurrentlinkedhashmap-lru-1.2_jdk5.jar
WEB-INF/lib/dom4j-1.6.1.jar
WEB-INF/lib/ehcache-core-2.4.6.jar
WEB-INF/lib/encryption-1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/ezmorph-1.0.6.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-bootstrap-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-core-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-crud-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-datastore-core-1.0.9.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-datastore-gorm-1.0.9.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-datastore-simple-1.0.9.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-hibernate-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-logging-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-codecs-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-controllers-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-converters-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-datasource-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-domain-class-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-filters-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-gsp-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-i18n-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-log4j-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-mimetypes-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-scaffolding-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-services-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-servlets-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-url-mappings-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-plugin-validation-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-resources-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-spring-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-web-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/grails-webflow-2.1.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/groovy-all-1.8.6.jar
WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-ehcache-3.6.10.Final.jar
WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-jpa-2.0-api-1.0.1.Final.jar
WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-validator-4.1.0.Final.jar
WEB-INF/lib/http-builder-0.5.0-RC3.jar
WEB-INF/lib/httpclient-4.0.jar
WEB-INF/lib/httpcore-4.0.1.jar
WEB-INF/lib/json-lib-2.3-jdk15.jar
WEB-INF/lib/jstl-1.1.2.jar
WEB-INF/lib/nekohtml-1.9.9.jar
WEB-INF/lib/oro-2.0.8.jar
WEB-INF/lib/sitemesh-2.4.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-aspects-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-jdbc-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-jms-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-orm-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-tx-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar
WEB-INF/lib/util-io-1.2-SNAPSHOT.jar
WEB-INF/lib/utils-1.07.00.jar
WEB-INF/lib/validation-api-1.0.0.GA.jar
WEB-INF/lib/xml-resolver-1.2.jar
WEB-INF/lib/xpp3_min-1.1.4c.jar
WEB-INF/lib/zdecimal-3.2.jar
WEB-INF/plugins/hibernate-2.1.0/grails-app/i18n/messages.properties
WEB-INF/plugins/hibernate-2.1.0/plugin.xml
WEB-INF/sitemesh.xml
WEB-INF/web.xml

And Config.groovy (with app-specific stuff removed):

grails.project.groupId = appName // change this to alter the default package name and Maven publishing destination
grails.mime.file.extensions = true // enables the parsing of file extensions from URLs into the request format
grails.mime.use.accept.header = false
grails.mime.types = [
    all:           '*/*',
    atom:          'application/atom+xml',
    css:           'text/css',
    csv:           'text/csv',
    form:          'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
    html:          ['text/html','application/xhtml+xml'],
    js:            'text/javascript',
    json:          ['application/json', 'text/json'],
    multipartForm: 'multipart/form-data',
    rss:           'application/rss+xml',
    text:          'text/plain',
    xml:           ['text/xml', 'application/xml']
]
grails.resources.adhoc.patterns = ['/images/*', '/css/*', '/js/*', '/plugins/*']
grails.views.default.codec = "none" // none, html, base64
grails.views.gsp.encoding = "UTF-8"
grails.converters.encoding = "UTF-8"
grails.views.gsp.sitemesh.preprocess = true
grails.scaffolding.templates.domainSuffix = 'Instance'
grails.json.legacy.builder = false
grails.enable.native2ascii = true
grails.logging.jul.usebridge = true
grails.spring.bean.packages = []
grails.hibernate.cache.queries = false
environments {
    production {
        grails.logging.jul.usebridge = false
    }
    development {
        grails.logging.jul.usebridge = true
    }
    test {
        // shouldn't be using this environment
    }
}

Answer 1

Through some debugging breakpoints, I was able to determine that the Grails log4j plugin is the culprit. It appears to be resetting the global log4j config on startup.

I'll ask a separate question about how to disable this.

• see How do disable log4j plugin in grails?