NGINX Cookbook

How to do it...

To start with, we need to define our new log format:

log_format vhostlogs '$host $remote_addr - $remote_user '  
                     '[$time_local] "$request" $status ' 
                     '$body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '   
                     '"$http_user_agent"'; 

The log_format directive needs to be outside the server block.

To use our new log file, we update the access log format in the server block with the new format. Here's an example with our MediaWiki recipe:

access_log  /var/log/nginx/mediawiki-vhost-access.log vhostlogs; 

If you had a wildcard setup for your subdomains, this would mean that you'd also have the correct hostname in the logs as well. Without this, the logs wouldn't be able to differentiate between any of the subdomains for statistical analysis and comparison. ...