NGINX Cookbook

How to do it...

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

log_format applogs '$remote_addr $remote_user $time_iso8601' 
                   '"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent ' 
                   '$request_time $upstream_response_time'; 

The log_format directive needs to be outside the server block.

Here, we've deviated from the combined format to change the time to the ISO 8601 format (which will look something like 2016-07-16T21:48:36+00:00), removed the HTTP referrer and user agent, but added the request processing time ($request_time) to get a better idea on how much time it's taking our application to generate responses.

With our new log format defined, we can now use this for our application logs:

access_log  /var/log/nginx/meteor-access.log  applogs; 

We're using ...