Logging API

Maven uses Plexus Container logging API, like any other Plexus components, ie LoggerManager / Logger.

Starting with Maven 3.1.0:

• Maven supports SLF4J API logging API too, ie LoggerFactory / Logger,
• instead of implementing Plexus logging API itself with basic output to console, Maven implements it using SLF4J API in Slf4jLoggerManager / Slf4jLogger.

Logging Implementation

Maven 3.1.0 ships bundled with SLF4J simple logger and since 3.5.0 Maven-customized maven-slf4j-provider, but is ready to use other logging implementations: SLF4J is responsible for loading the implementation, referred to as "SLF4J bindings".

Logging configuration loading is actually done by logging implementation, without any Maven extensions to support merging Maven installation configuration with per-user configuration for example: ${maven.conf}/logging directory was added to core's classpath (see ${maven.home}/bin/m2.conf). See your implementation documentation for details on file names, formats, and so on.

During Maven initialization, Maven tweaks default root logging level to match CLI verbosity choice. Since such feature isn't available in SLF4J API, logging implementation specific extensions need to be added into Maven to support these CLI options: see Slf4jConfigurationFactory / Slf4jConfiguration.

Getting Logger Instance

Starting with Maven 3.1.0, SLF4J Logger can be used directly. This technique can be used safely in Maven core components or in plugins/component not requiring compatibility with previous Maven versions.

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

public class MyClass
{
   final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger( MyClass.class );
}

Logger Name

Logger name is basically the classical fully qualified class name: it's not visible by default, but can be activated (see user documentation).

Notice that before Maven 3.1.0, with logger created by Maven, some code used to pass logger from class to class because it could not create a new logger: discrepencies between logger name and actual class may happen.