Ubuntu: Tomcat upstart script. Logs end up in upstart log

Question

I have a simple upstart script for tomcat. Here is the chef template:

description "Tomcat Server"

  start on runlevel [2345]
  stop on runlevel [!2345]
  respawn
  respawn limit 10 5

  # run as non privileged user 
  # add user with this command:
  ## adduser --system --ingroup www-data --home /opt/apache-tomcat apache-tomcat
  setuid "<%= node['tomcat']['user'] %>"
  setgid "<%= node['tomcat']['group'] %>"

  # paths:
  env JAVA_HOME="<%= node["java"]["home"] %>"
  env CATALINA_BASE="<%= node["tomcat"]["base"] %>"
  env CATALINA_HOME="<%= node["tomcat"]["home"] %>/current"

  exec $CATALINA_HOME/bin/catalina.sh run

  # cleanup temp directory after stop
  post-stop script 
    rm -rf $CATALINA_HOME/temp/*
  end script

After switching from init script to the upstart script posted above, all tomcat logs are written to /var/log/upstart/tomcat. Is there any reason why all logs go into the upstart log? What's a good way to work around that? This is on ubuntu 12.04

Answer 1

The upstart cookbook provides an explanation for what's going on. In short, "Standard output and standard error are ... automatically logged to a file in directory /var/log/upstart/". The 'catalina.sh run' command sends all output to stdout. So, upstart is redirecting stdout to the upstart log.

I took the following approach to the problem:

# Manually specify CATALINA_OUT, so we can redirect ourselves
env CATALINA_OUT=<path to catalina_base>/logs/catalina.out

# Stop upstart from handling stdout/stderr & redirect to the log file ourselves
console none
exec $CATALINA_HOME/bin/catalina.sh run >> "$CATALINA_OUT" 2>&1

I tried to exec 'catalina.sh start', which if you look at the catalina script redirects output to CATALINA_OUT itself. But, I was unable to have upstart correctly manage the process. Neither 'expect fork' nor 'expect daemon' was able to manage the backgrounded process created from the catalina startup script.