Changing log level without restarting application

5
votes

It is possible to change log4net logging level without restart ASP.NET application. Some possible ways to configure log4net configuration are:

  • ASP.NET web config file.
  • adding separate config file and referring config file inside AssemblyInfo.cs file: [assembly:log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator(ConfigFile="Log4Net.config",Watch=true)]

Changing the configuration in a web.config file will restart the application. If I don't want to restart the application, is it recommended to use the separate configuration file or is there any different approach for this?

1
asp.netlog4netlog4net-configuration

1 Answers

7
votes

If you set an external configuration file and set its watch to true you can indeed change the logging configuration without restarting the application:

Watch

If this flag is specified and set to true then the framework will watch the configuration file and will reload the config each time the file is modified.

from the configuration page

There are some other ways to do it, namely you can change the configuration through code but why would you want to do that since you can as well change the configuration file. In the end, implementing other ways than the config file to change logging at runtime isn't very effective, so don't bother :)