Spring boot 2.0/Tomcat 8.5 - Session attribute in log file

Question

I want to log the username from which every request was made. After successfully logged in, I use this method to set the username to session variable - username.

@Override
    public void onAuthenticationSuccess(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response, Authentication authentication) throws IOException, ServletException {
        String username = merchandiserRepository.findByUsername(authentication.getName()).getUsername();
        request.getSession(true).setAttribute("username", username);
        logger.warn("Successfully logged in: " + username);
        response.sendRedirect("/page/1");
    }

And in my Tomcat log pattern is:

server.tomcat.accesslog.pattern=%h %l %{username}s %t "%r" %s %b %T %{User-Agent}i

Where %{username}s should be the username, but it displays " - " I saw this attribute from - https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.5-doc/config/valve.html

I'm using redis for session persistent. Any suggestions why it is not working?

Answer 1

I think I understand what you are trying to accomplish. I accomplished the same thing, a slightly different way.

Try adding this dependency:

    <dependency>
        <groupId>net.rakugakibox.spring.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>logback-access-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
        <version>2.5.0</version>
    </dependency>

And here is my logback-access.xml which I put into my src/main/resources/

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
    <configuration debug="false" scan="false">
        <statusListener class="ch.qos.logback.core.status.NopStatusListener"/>
        <appender name="CONSOLE" class="ch.qos.logback.core.ConsoleAppender">
            <encoder class="net.logstash.logback.encoder.LogstashAccessEncoder">
                <fieldNames>
                    <message>message</message>
                </fieldNames>
            </encoder>
        </appender>
        <appender-ref ref="CONSOLE"/>
    </configuration>

I don't know the root cause of your issue, but this might be a solution to what you are trying to accomplish.