Play 2.2.x and Akka Logging

It gets frustrating if logs go missing when we are struggling to debug something. Something like this is very likely to happen when we use a third party library which uses Akka internally within our Play application.

After struggling for quite sometime, I figured out the changes that were needed to configure the log settings correctly. Some of the things are specified in loggingSetting configuration for Play 2.3 but I wasn't looking at it cos I was using an older version of Play(2.2.x).

It is very simple and requires only 2 small changes - one in conf/application.conf and the other in logger.xml. Update the log level for play actors as well as the actors in the third party library,

  play.akka.loglevel="DEBUG"
  third-party-lib{
   akka {
    loggers = ["akka.event.slf4j.Slf4jLogger"]
    loglevel = "DEBUG"
   }
  }


And now, add specific loggers in conf/logger.xml.

  <logger name="play" level="DEBUG"/>
  <logger name="application" level="DEBUG"/>
  <logger name="com.project.actors" level="DEBUG"/>
  <logger name="third.party.lib.actors" level="DEBUG"/>


Note: The "name" attribute should be set to the required package name.

A sample configuration file which adds the logs to just the file logs/application.log