[slf4j-user] Newbie: Change logging level programmatically?

[Joachim Durchholz]

Am 17.10.2016 um 01:31 schrieb Andrew P. Lentvorski:
> I'm clearly missing something obvious, but I absolutely cannot figure
> out how to change the logging level

You do not configure SLF4J, you configure the backend you're using 
(logback, log4j, or whatever it is).
These are typically configured using property files.

 > in either my build.gradle file

The primary purpose of Gradle is to build your software, i.e. to compile 
it, package it in jars, and possibly deploy it.
It does not run your code - unless you do automated testing, which means 
it will run your code for some scenarios but not all where you want 
logging. Not unless you're doing something very unusual anyway :-)

So build.gradle is probably not the right place to configure logging.

 > or my actual Java code.

Best practice is to avoid doing that as far as possible.
You want log levels to be configurable from the config file, so you can 
change them withough having to recompile the code.
(The purpose of logging is for diagnosis: Software health monitoring, 
pinpointing bugs, etc. Per-package log levels allow you to highlight 
those parts of that machine that are under investigation, so you want to 
be able to adjust that on the fly. At least one backend allows you to 
reconfigure logging while the software is running.)

> I don't want to use command line options for various reasons.  (The
> primary reason being that Buildship (Eclipse gradle integration) doesn't
> seem to cooperate very well with them).

Buildship has no business with passing on command-line parameters 
actually; its primary purposes are to run the various rules of a 
build.gradle, and to update the Eclipse project's compiler etc. settings 
so that they match what build.gradle is doing.

So if you want to pass on command-line parameters inside the Gradle 
build, you do that in gradle.build; if you want to pass them to your 
running code, you use an Eclipse launch configuration.
(You can store launch configurations as part of your project. It's 
inside the "Common" tab of the launch configuration.)

HTH
Jo