NGINX Cookbook

How to do it...

There are a few different ways we can customize the access logs in order to get more relevant information or reduce the amount of logging where it's not required. The standard configuration of combined is as follows:

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

This format is already predefined in NGINX out of the box, which is compatible with the Apache combined format. What this means is that, by default, combined formatted logs will be compatible with most log parsers and, will be therefore, able to directly interpret the log data.

While having more data can be quite helpful (as we'll show later), be careful about deviating ...