NGINX error log format documentation

[Francis Daly]

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 08:47:42PM +0200, Jan Teske wrote:

Hi there,

> I want to parse NGINX error logs. However, I did not find any 
> documentation concerning the used log format.
 
  less src/core/ngx_log.c

should probably show most of what you need. Combine that with

  grep -r -A 2 ngx_log_error src

and looking at an error log and you should see that it is "a small number
(five, I think) of fixed fields, followed by free-form text".

> While the meaning of some 
> fields like the data is pretty obvious, for some it is not at all. In 
> addition, I cannot be sure that my parser is complete if I do not have a 
> documentation of all the possible fields. Since it seems you can change 
> the access log format, but not that of the error log, I really have no 
> idea how to get the information I need.

I (strongly) suspect that the error log line format details is not
something that nginx wants to commit to holding stable.

If you want to do any more parsing than "free-form text after a handful of
common fields", then you'll probably want to care about the version you
are using. Or at least, flag an imperfectly-recognised line if anything
doesn't match what you expect.

> Is there such documentation?

It's hard to beat the contents of src/ for accuracy.

Choose the "identifying" string in the line you care about, find the
matching ngx_error_log call, and then see what free-form text it provides
in the current version.

	f
-- 
Francis Daly        francis at daoine.org