Question

I use log4net all the time, but one thing I’ve never figured out is how to tell what’s going on on the inside. For example, I’ve got a console appender and a database appender in my project. I made a few changes to the database and the code, and now the database appender doesn’t work anymore. I’ll figure out why eventually, but it would help a lot if I could see what’s going on inside log4net.

Does log4net generate any kind of output that I can view to try to determine the source of my problem?

Answer 1

First you have to set this value on the application configuration file:

<configuration>    <appSettings>       <add key='log4net.Internal.Debug' value='true'/>    </appSettings> </configuration> 

Then, to determine the file in which you want to save the output you can add the following code in the same .config file:

<configuration> ...  <system.diagnostics>     <trace autoflush='true'>         <listeners>             <add                  name='textWriterTraceListener'                  type='System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener'                  initializeData='C:\tmp\log4net.txt' />         </listeners>     </trace> </system.diagnostics>  ... </configuration> 

You can find a more detailed explanation under ‘How do I enable log4net internal debugging?’ in the log4net FAQ page.