Naming a virtual location to avoid logging results in 404s

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 07:41:33AM -0500, BigdinoWebmaster wrote:

> I'm hosting a forum using Vanilla 
> (http://www.vanillaforums.org), and its internal statistics 
> tracking involves no small amount of GETs and POSTs to URIs that 
> don't correspond to actual directories underneath the web root.  
> Since every active user on the forum generates lots of these 
> every minute, I wanted to exclude them from being logged to keep 
> the server logs from growing to an unreasonable size, and so I 
> added the following three lines to my server config to stop 
> logging of the three main ones:
> 
> location /plugin/imonline { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
> location /dashboard/notifications/inform { access_log off; 
> log_not_found off; }
> location /settings/analyticstick.json { access_log off; 
> log_not_found off; }
> 
> 
> Prior to adding the lines, the requests to those locations would 
> generate an HTTP 200 response and the corresponding analytic 
> action (counting thread views, showing who is online, etc) would 
> be recorded in the forum's database. After adding the lines, all 
> GETs and POSTs receive 404s, like this:

[...]

You should add correct processing to the locations you added as 
well as access_log off, likely something like proxy_pass or 
fastcgi_pass:

    location /plugin/imonline {
        access_log off;
        log_not_found off;
        proxy_pass http://your.backend.host;
        ...
    }

Without this requests which match these locations are processed as 
static, and end up with 404 as there are no corresponding files.

Maxim Dounin