log4net AppSettings Keys

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There doesn’t appear to be anywhere on the log4net site where the “magic app setting keys” are listed with their explanations and I always have to re-discover them on each project, so I figured I’d post them for later.

Key Type Description Example Values
log4net.Config string Application-relative path to the default log4net XML configuration file. If you populate this value, the first time you get a logger on the default repository log4net will read and auto-configure itself using this file. Note that it doesn’t set a FileSystemWatcher on it so if you change the file later the changes won’t be automatically picked up. The value can also be a URL to an external file. If it is, log4net will actually do a WebRequest and go get the remote configuration file. config\log4net.config, http://remoteserver/config/log4net.config
log4net.Internal.Debug Boolean Enables logging for log4net itself. If you’re writing custom log appenders or other things that integrate with log4net, this is super helpful true, false
log4net.Internal.Quiet Boolean Silences the log4net internal logging. Overrides the value set for log4net.Internal.Debug. true, false

Here’s a sample configuration file snippet that shows these in action.

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <configuration>
      <appSettings>
        <add key="log4net.Config" value="config\log4net.config" />
        <add key="log4net.Internal.Debug" value="false" />
      </appSettings>
    </configuration>

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