Grails log4j JMX in one easy step

Here is a quick way to enable log4j control in JMX with Grails. Just update your resources.groovy like so:

import org.springframework.jmx.support.MBeanServerFactoryBean
import org.springframework.jmx.export.MBeanExporter
import org.apache.log4j.jmx.HierarchyDynamicMBean

beans = {
  log4jBean(HierarchyDynamicMBean)
 
  mbeanServer(MBeanServerFactoryBean) {
    locateExistingServerIfPossible=true
  }
 
  exporter(MBeanExporter) {
    server = mbeanServer
    beans = ["log4j:hierarchy=default":log4jBean]
  }
}

That's it. Now you can use jconsole to control your log4j settings, which during development/debug can be quite helpful. Of course you could take this much further by only enabling it in specific environments (e.g. development only), but that's up to you!