Logging to syslog

If you already have your centralized server logs or your logs are analyzed by a standard syslog system, you can also redirect your NGINX logs to do the same. This is useful when using external platforms such as Loggly and Papertrail, which integrate via syslog.

How to do it...

Firstly, we need to consider where we're pushing the logs to, syslog can be both local and network-based, so we'll cover both ways. For nearly all Linux distributions, the default syslog service is rsyslog which will be listening on the Unix socket located at /dev/log. Here's our NGINX configuration for local logging:

server { 
    listen              80; 
    server_name         syslog.nginxcookbook.com; 
    access_log syslog:server=unix:/dev/log; 
    error_log syslog:server=unix:/dev/log; 
    location /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; } 
    root /var/www; 
} 

The handling of the logs will now be done by rsyslog. By default, this will match the wildcard rule and write the log entries...