Windows – how change nginx temp & log folder or disable logging completely

loggingnginxread-onlywindows

I'm running nginx 1.3.5 under windows seven, I need to execute nginx directly from a read-only media (CD or DVD), but when I want to run it, it fails with this error:

nginx: [alert] could not open error log file: CreateFile() "logs/error.log" fail
ed (5: Access is denied)
2012/08/28 13:52:46 [emerg] 5604#2864: CreateDirectory() "J:\nginx-1.3.5/temp/client_body_temp" failed (5: Access is denied)

where J is my CD-ROM drive letter.
I've changed nginx.conf to disable logging completely, but seems anyway it still tries to build a file named 'error.log' in '/logs' folder & some extra temporary contents in '/temp' folder at the startup, so I want to change 'logs' & 'temp' directory path to windows temp folder (%temp%), but I dont have any idea that how can I do it.
Also I want to know why nginx still creates 'logs/error.log' after disableing error logging ?

Best Answer

http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_log_module.html lists the directives for controlling logging, specifcally you have the 2 following:

syntax:     access_log path [format [buffer=size]]; 
            access_log off;
default:    access_log logs/access.log combined;
context:    http, server, location, if in location, limit_except

and

syntax:     error_log file | stderr [debug | info | notice | warn | error | crit | alert | emerg];
default:    error_log logs/error.log error;
context:    main, http, server, location

so while you can completely disable the access_log, the same doesn't seem to be true for the error_log. Nevertheless you can still achieve the effect you want by adding the following to your nginx config;

error_log /dev/null emerg; #redirect the logging we can't shut off to a black hole;
acces_log off; #disable acces log

UPDATE: just noticed the windows tag, see this question for the windows /dev/null equivalent

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Turn out my first answer to this question was correct at certain time, but it turned into another pitfall - to stay up to date please check Taxing rewrite pitfalls

I have been corrected by many SE users, so the credit goes to them, but more importantly, here is the correct code:

server {
       listen         80;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       return         301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
       listen         443 ssl;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       # add Strict-Transport-Security to prevent man in the middle attacks
       add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000" always; 

       [....]
}

Nginx Restart Issues

Or, you can change the nginx.log file permissions so they match your current user which you use to start nginx:

chown your_user /var/log/nginx/error.log

I suggest you add this permisions to the entire nginx log dir

chown -R your_user /var/log/nginx/

Best Answer

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NGINX Redirect – How to Rewrite All HTTP Requests to HTTPS While Maintaining Sub-Domain

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Nginx Restart Issues

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