Nginx log request before processing

loggingnginx

I have nginx server serving a lot of big files. I can see plenty of connections on the server. As it iw know, file to the accesslog is written after the request is completed.

Is there any way to log request before it is served? The problem is that it takes hours to download large files and I would like to know which files were hit.

Best Answer

No this is not natively possible and that would not make much sense too since most logging information requires the request to complete (status code, bytes sent, durations, etc).

But you can still workaround this with the use of a third party scripting module (perl, lua , groovy etc) that would set you free to do whatever you want while the request is being processed.

Related Solutions

NginX Log Rotation

It has become a sort-of informal semi-standard among Unix daemons that they flush and/or rotate their log files, when you send them a hangup signal (SIGHUP). Nginx doesn't follow this convention to the letter, but it responds to the USR1 signal the same way, as is documented on the Nginx website under the title Log Rotation.

So, you could try something like

kill -s USR1 `pidof nginx`

Nginx – How to determine which request nginx sends to a proxy and which it serves

Depending on your configuration, it may be easy to achieve. Here is my solution...

server {
  server_name domainname.com;
  root /path/to/files;
  # index index.php index.html;

  # logging of all requests in access.log
  access_log /some/path/such/as/var/log/nginx/access.log;

  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri @thin;
  }

  location @thin {
    # pass the requests to thin
    # proxy_pass http://thin;

    # proxy specific logging in proxy-access.log
    access_log /some/path/such/as/var/log/nginx/proxy-access.log;
  }
}

Hope this helps!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

NginX Log Rotation

Nginx – How to determine which request nginx sends to a proxy and which it serves

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