Using Log4J2 with SLF4J in a Spring 4 MVC

In one of the spring web applications we decided to use Log4J2 with SLF4J; when we deployed the web app in tomcat server along with the required jars we stumbled on the issue multiple binding for SLF4J and spring dependencies not getting satisfied. We had used Gradle and there were transitive dependencies which included log4j-12xx.jar and slf4j-log4j.jar as some of the dependencies in the project were using log4j version 1 for logging. Here is how we were able to start logging using log4j2.

Exclude the log4j-12xx.jar and slf4j-log modules from the gradle build

configurations {
 all*.exclude group: "org.slf4j", module: "slf4j-log4j12"
 all*.exclude group: "log4j", module: "log4j"
}

Add the following jars

org.slf4j:log4j-over-slf4j|route all the log4j v1 to slf4j
org.slf4j:slf4j-api|slf4j api
org.apache.logging.log4j:log4j-slf4j-impl|log4j2 bridge
org.apache.logging.log4j:log4j-core|log4j2 core
org.apache.logging.log4j:log4j-api|log4j2 api

Add the log4j2.xml configurations to the classpath or as specified at log4j manual.