How to intercept SLF4J (with logback) logging via a JUnit test?

The Slf4j API doesn’t provide such a way but Logback provides a simple solution.

You can use ListAppender : a whitebox logback appender where log entries are added in a public List field that we could use to make our assertions.

Here is a simple example.

Foo class :

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

public class Foo {

    static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(Foo .class);

    public void doThat() {
        logger.info("start");
        //...
        logger.info("finish");
    }
}

FooTest class :

import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import ch.qos.logback.classic.Level;
import ch.qos.logback.classic.Logger;
import ch.qos.logback.classic.spi.ILoggingEvent;
import ch.qos.logback.core.read.ListAppender;

public class FooTest {

    @Test
    void doThat() throws Exception {
        // get Logback Logger 
        Logger fooLogger = (Logger) LoggerFactory.getLogger(Foo.class);

        // create and start a ListAppender
        ListAppender<ILoggingEvent> listAppender = new ListAppender<>();
        listAppender.start();

        // add the appender to the logger
        fooLogger.addAppender(listAppender);

        // call method under test
        Foo foo = new Foo();
        foo.doThat();

        // JUnit assertions
        List<ILoggingEvent> logsList = listAppender.list;
        assertEquals("start", logsList.get(0)
                                      .getMessage());
        assertEquals(Level.INFO, logsList.get(0)
                                         .getLevel());

        assertEquals("finish", logsList.get(1)
                                       .getMessage());
        assertEquals(Level.INFO, logsList.get(1)
                                         .getLevel());
    }
}

You can also use Matcher/assertion libraries as AssertJ or Hamcrest.

With AssertJ it would be :

import org.assertj.core.api.Assertions;

Assertions.assertThat(listAppender.list)
          .extracting(ILoggingEvent::getFormattedMessage, ILoggingEvent::getLevel)
          .containsExactly(Tuple.tuple("start", Level.INFO), Tuple.tuple("finish", Level.INFO));