Default log file locations

[Valentin V. Bartenev]

On Thursday 27 June 2019 19:12:51 Peter Bittner wrote:
> Hi there!
> 
> In my day job I'm helping to get applications from traditional
> environments running in cloud environments. Cloud native applications
> are just "normal" applications, but there are a few properties that
> they should satisfy (apart from resiliency and scalability).
> 
> For logging this boils down to what is prescribed by the 12-factor
> app: The log output should be a continuous stream, i.e. simply log to
> the terminal.
> 
> Now, as of today, at least on Debian based container images, the
> behavior of Nginx is to write to /var/log/nginx/access.log and
> /var/log/nginx/error.log by default. We try to compensate this by
> making those files symbolic links to /dev/stdout and /dev/stderr.
> We're doing this also, because there seem to be cases when a log entry
> is written _before_ it is configured via the Nginx configuration file.
> 
> From my perspective it would be advantageous to have Nginx write to
> the terminal by default (i.e. no hardcoded log file locations) and
> allow to override this behavior via the Nginx configuration file.
> 
> Is there any reason why the default behavior is not that way yet?
[..]

Afaik, there's no way in Linux systems to write to terminal in
non-blocking manner.  As the result, writing log can block the
whole nginx worker process and cause DoS.

IMHO, it's not a good idea to make your web-application depend
on logging capabilities.

  wbr, Valentin V. Bartenev