Request Logs

Request logs are a record of the requests that the server has processed. There is one entry per request received, and commonly in the standard NCSA format so they can be conveniently analysed by tools like webalizer.

A standard request log entry includes the client IP, date, method, URL, result, size, referrer and user agent. eg:

123.4.5.6 - - [27/Aug/2004:10:16:17 +0000]
 "GET /jetty/tut/XmlConfiguration.html HTTP/1.1"
 200 76793 "http://localhost:8080/jetty/tut/logging.html"
 "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8"

Jetty provides an implementation called NCSARequestLog which supports the NCSA format in files that can be rolled over on a daily basis.

Configuring a Request Log for a Jetty Server

To configure a single request log for the entire Jetty Server instance:

<Set name="handler">
      <New id="Handlers" class="org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerCollection">
        <Set name="handlers">
         <Array type="org.mortbay.jetty.Handler">
           <Item>
             <New id="Contexts" class="org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandlerCollection"/>
           </Item>
           <Item>
             <New id="DefaultHandler" class="org.mortbay.jetty.handler.DefaultHandler"/>
           </Item>
           <Item>
             <New id="RequestLog" class="org.mortbay.jetty.handler.RequestLogHandler"/>
           </Item>
         </Array>
        </Set>
      </New>
    </Set>


    <Ref id="RequestLog">
      <Set name="requestLog">
        <New id="RequestLogImpl" class="org.mortbay.jetty.NCSARequestLog">
          <Arg><SystemProperty name="jetty.logs" default="./logs"/>/yyyy_mm_dd.request.log</Arg>
          <Set name="retainDays">90</Set>
          <Set name="append">true</Set>
          <Set name="extended">false</Set>
          <Set name="LogTimeZone">GMT</Set>
        </New>
      </Set>
    </Ref>

The equivalent code is:

HandlerCollection handlers = new HandlerCollection();
        ContextHandlerCollection contexts = new ContextHandlerCollection();
        RequestLogHandler requestLogHandler = new RequestLogHandler();
        handlers.setHandlers(new Handler[]{contexts,new DefaultHandler(),requestLogHandler});
        server.setHandler(handlers);

        NCSARequestLog requestLog = new NCSARequestLog("./logs/jetty-yyyy_mm_dd.request.log");
        requestLog.setRetainDays(90);
        requestLog.setAppend(true);
        requestLog.setExtended(false);
        requestLog.setLogTimeZone("GMT");
        requestLogHandler.setRequestLog(requestLog);

This configures a request log in $JETTY_HOME/logs with filenames including the date. Old log files are kept for 90 days before being deleted. Existing log files are appended to and the extended NCSA format is used in the GMT timezone.

There are many more configuration options available - see http://jetty.mortbay.org/apidocs/org/mortbay/jetty/NCSARequestLog.html

Configuring a Request Log per webapp

<Configure class="org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">

  ...

  <Call name="addHandler">
    <Arg>
    <New class="org.mortbay.jetty.handler.RequestLogHandler">
      <Set name="requestLog">
        <New id="RequestLogImpl" class="org.mortbay.jetty.NCSARequestLog">
          <Arg><SystemProperty name="jetty.logs" default="./logs"/>/yyyy_mm_dd.test.request.log</Arg>
          <Set name="retainDays">90</Set>
          <Set name="append">true</Set>
          <Set name="extended">false</Set>
          <Set name="LogTimeZone">GMT</Set>
        </New>
      </Set>
    </New>
    </Arg>
  </Call>

  ...

</Configure>