Logs not showing up when running JAR as a service

Question

I have a fat JAR (Spring Boot) that if I start using java -jar filename.jar creates two log files: one application log (that's usually stdout) and another one that creates an entry each time the webserver is hit.

Now when I start this as a service with a file in /etc/init.d/ (see snippet below) I don't get any log files created (other than /opt/service-name/log that only shows stdout before the application starts). It's not a permission issue - I tried starting the service with a user that doesn't have permissions and it doesn't start. And I tried find / logfile.log with no luck.

daemon --user=root --pidfile=/var/run/service-name.pid java -jar /opt/service-name/filename.jar > /opt/service-name/log 2>&1 & echo $!

Any ideas why the log files are not being created?

Answer 1

So if I set the application to specifically log to /var/log/service-name/ logs do get written. Still unsure why, will update if I find out.

Answer 2

Try to first redirect stderr to stdout, and then redirect stdout to file, e.g.

daemon --user=root --pidfile=/var/run/service-name.pid java -jar /opt/service-name/filename.jar 2>&1 >/opt/service-name/log & echo $!

Also, the & echo $! part looks suspicious to me. If I read specs correctly, a single & may result in echo $! returning before daemon has returned, which means you will get a wrong pid. Do you want to run && echo $! or perhaps ; echo $! instead?