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• Prior to Tomcat 5.5, Tomcat provided a Logger element that you could configure and extend according to your needs.
• Starting with Tomcat 5.5, Logger was removed and Apache Commons-Logging Log is used everywhere in Tomcat. Read the Commons-Logging documentation if you'd like to know how to better use and configure Tomcat's internal logging. See also http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/logging.html
• In Tomcat 7 (and also 6), the logging code is based on a set of classes interacting with the java.util.logging API (JUL), which comes with Java since version 1.4. The Tomcat startup script configures the JVM to uses use a web-application-aware implementation of the JUL LogManager. This Tomcat logging infrastructure is called JULI, and one can still distinguish its Apache Commons Logging heritage, but the complex configuration has been edited out and the package name changed.
  

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1. If you are using jsvc 1.0.4 or later (from Apache Commons Daemon project) to launch Tomcat, you can send SIGUSR1 signal to jsvc to get it to re-open its log files (Jira Ticket). You can couple this with 'logrotate' or your favorite log-rotation utility (including good-old 'mv') to re-name catalina.out at intervals and then get jsvc to re-open the original (catalina.out) file and continue writing to it.
2. Use 'logrotate' with the 'copytruncate' option. This allows you to externally rotate catalina.out without changing anything within Tomcat.
3. Modify bin/catalina.sh (or bin/catalina.bat) to pipe output from the JVM into a piped-logger such as chronolog or Apache httpd's rotatelogs (note that the previous reference is for Apache httpd documentation and *is not applicable to Tomcat* – it merely illustrates the concept).
   

References to mailing list discussions:

• tomcat-user users thread from 2003
• tomcat-user users thread from 2009
• tomcat-user users thread from 2011
• tomcttomcat-user users thread from 2012
  

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