Rhino uses the Log4j 2 plugin architecture to support any Log4j 2 appender and allow addition of custom appenders.
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See the Apache Log4j 2 Plugins documentation for more information about plugins. |
Many of the appenders provided by Log4j 2 have additional dependencies. These are not packaged with Rhino. Some examples include:
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Cassandra Appender
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JDBC Appender
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Kafka Appender
Installing appender dependencies and custom plugins
If you want to use a custom plugin or a Log4j 2 appender that requires additional dependencies, you must put the required JARs into ${RHINO_HOME}/lib/logging-plugins/.
Any jars found in this directory are added to the core logging classloader.
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Files in ${RHINO_HOME}/lib/logging-plugins are only scanned at node boot time.
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This classloader is not visible to the main application classloaders. Because it is isolated, it can contain versions of libraries that would otherwise conflict with versions of libraries deployed in the SLEE. (It can’t contain multiple versions of the same library if different appenders require different versions.)
Custom plugins may affect the stability of Rhino nodes.
Custom plugins
Log4j 2 provides multiple mechanisms for plugin discovery. The only mechanism supported by Rhino is use of the Log4j 2 annotation processor during the plugin build phase.
The Log4j 2 annotation processor works by scanning for Log4j 2 plugins and generating a metadata file in your processed classes.
The Java compiler will automatically pick up the annotation processor if it is in the classpath.
If the annotation processor is disabled during the compilation phase, you must add another compiler pass to your build process that does annotation processing for org.apache.logging.log4j.core.config.plugins.processor.PluginProcessor.
Importing a Rhino export
Dependencies for logging plugins are not included in a Rhino export, even if there is configuration that requires those dependencies.
So when using rhino-export and importing into a new Rhino instance, the logging plugins must be copied manually.
Copy ${RHINO_HOME}/lib/logging-plugins to the new Rhino location.
Rhino upgrades
The Log4j 2 version may be updated in new Rhino releases, if bug fixes in the core implementation are needed. When this happens, it is possible that plugins may need to updated for the new Log4j version. Changes to the Log4j version will be documented in the Rhino changelog.
