Have nginx access_log and error_log log to STDOUT

Question

Is there a way to have the master process log to STDOUT STDERR instead of to a file?

It seems that you can only pass a filepath to the access_log directive:

access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log

And the same goes for error_log:

error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log

I understand that this simply may not be a feature of nginx, I'd be interested in a concise solution that uses tail, for example. It is preferable though that it comes from the master process though because I am running nginx in the foreground.

Answer 1

Edit: it seems nginx now supports error_log stderr; as mentioned in Anon's answer.

You can send the logs to /dev/stdout. In nginx.conf:

daemon off;
error_log /dev/stdout info;

http {
  access_log /dev/stdout;
  ...
}

edit: May need to run ln -sf /proc/self/fd /dev/ if using running certain docker containers, then use /dev/fd/1 or /dev/fd/2

Answer 2

Syntax: error_log file | stderr | syslog:server=address[,parameter=value] | memory:size [debug | info | notice | warn | error | crit | alert | emerg];
Default:    
error_log logs/error.log error;
Context:    main, http, stream, server, location

http://nginx.org/en/docs/ngx_core_module.html#error_log

Don't use: /dev/stderr This will break your setup if you're going to use systemd-nspawn.

Answer 3

When running Nginx in a Docker container, be aware that a volume mounted over the log dir defeats the purpose of creating a softlink between the log files and stdout/stderr in your Dockerfile, as described in @Boeboe 's answer.

In that case you can either create the softlink in your entrypoint (executed after volumes are mounted) or not use a volume at all (e.g. when logs are already collected by a central logging system).

Answer 4

If the question is docker related... the official nginx docker images do this by making softlinks towards stdout/stderr

RUN ln -sf /dev/stdout /var/log/nginx/access.log && ln -sf /dev/stderr /var/log/nginx/error.log

REF: https://microbadger.com/images/nginx