Cullen King

I will be the first to admit that I am not a stellar sysadmin, however I met a new low when I realized my nginx error log for my bike route mapping site was filled with 5 gigs of rewrite notifications. After thinking the solution would be easy, simply setting rewrite_log to off, I found out that didn’t actually do anything.

So, if you are trying to turn off rewrite rule logging in your nginx error log, you must do two things:

First, add

rewrite_log off;

to your main configuration. Then, make sure each error_log declaration has a level other than critical. I picked ‘warn’, and we’ll see if this fills up quick. My guess is for heavy hit sites, ‘error’ is the correct value. Your error log line should look like:

error_log /var/log/nginx.ridewithgps.com.error.log warn;

With those changes you should have a much smaller error log footprint, and grepping through your logs won’t grind on your disks too much.