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A debugging log
To enable a debugging log, nginx needs to be configured to support debugging during the build:
./configure --with-debug ...
Then the debug
level should be set with the error_log directive:
error_log /path/to/log debug;
To verify that nginx is configured to support debugging, run the nginx -V
command:
configure arguments: --with-debug ...
Pre-built Linux packages provide out-of-the-box support for debugging log with the nginx-debug
binary (1.9.8) which can be run using commands
service nginx stop
service nginx-debug start
and then set the debug
level. The nginx binary version for Windows is always built with the debugging log support, so only setting the debug
level will suffice.
Note that redefining the log without also specifying the debug
level will disable the debugging log. In the example below, redefining the log on the server level disables the debugging log for this server:
error_log /path/to/log debug;
http {
server {
error_log /path/to/log;
...
To avoid this, either the line redefining the log should be commented out, or the debug
level specification should also be added:
error_log /path/to/log debug;
http {
server {
error_log /path/to/log debug;
...
Debugging log for selected clients
It is also possible to enable the debugging log for selected client addresses only:
error_log /path/to/log;
events {
debug_connection 192.168.1.1;
debug_connection 192.168.10.0/24;
}
Logging to a cyclic memory buffer
The debugging log can be written to a cyclic memory buffer:
error_log memory:32m debug;
Logging to the memory buffer on the debug
level does not have significant impact on performance even under high load. In this case, the log can be extracted using a gdb
script like the following one:
set $log = ngx_cycle->log
while $log->writer != ngx_log_memory_writer
set $log = $log->next
end
set $buf = (ngx_log_memory_buf_t *) $log->wdata
dump binary memory debug_log.txt $buf->start $buf->end