Customizing web access logs

There are a number of ways you can customize the log files, including the format, the information provided, and where to save them to. This customization can be especially handy if you're using NGINX as a proxy in front of application servers, where traditional web style logs may not be as useful.

How to do it...

There are a few different ways we can customize the access logs in order to get more relevant information or reduce the amount of logging where it's not required. The standard configuration of combined is as follows:

log_format combined '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] ' 
                   '"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent ' 
                   '"$http_referer" "$http_user_agent"'; 

This format is already predefined in NGINX out of the box, which is compatible with the Apache combined format. What this means is that, by default, combined formatted logs will be compatible with most log parsers and, will be therefore, able to directly interpret...