How to disable stackdriver logging in a spring application for a GCP project without creating a new docker image

Question

I have a spring application packaged inside a docker image and running in GKE pods. I want to disable stackdriver logging but only for this application in gke. Is there any env variable/property I can change in my spring application to disable this? I am using these two jars -

<dependency>
            <groupId>com.google.cloud</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-cloud-gcp-starter</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.google.cloud</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-cloud-gcp-starter-logging</artifactId>
        </dependency>

I found one method i.e. to change application.properties to

spring.cloud.gcp.logging.enabled=false
stackdriver.log.level=OFF

But for this I will have to create a new docker image and redeploy. Is there any way I can do directly in my kubernetes yaml/env variable?

Update - these two variables in application.properties only worked once(stopped logging to stackdriver) and now its again logging to stackdriver. Strange behaviour.

Answer 1

There's no need to rebuild your container image. Spring applications can pull application properties from environment variables. Probably for some very good reason, the names require remapping. So

spring.cloud.gcp.logging.enabled becomes SPRING_CLOUD_GCP_LOGGING_ENABLED.

Your k8s pod definition allows passing in environment variables as part of a container specification (just like docker compose):

 spec:
      containers:
      - name: my-container
        image: myimage:latest
        env:
        - name: SPRING_CLOUD_GCP_LOGGING_ENABLED
          value: false

Apply the changes to the pod with the following. Your pod will be restarted.

kubectl apply -f <pod-definition-file.yaml>

stackdriver.log.level is left for you. I can't promise you that any of this will turn off logging, only that this will update application properties without requiring you to rebuild the container.