To effectively manage your web server, you need to get feedback about the activity and performance of the server and any problems that may be occurring. However, the amount of information that is stored in the log files is very large. Log files in use are uncompressed plain text that may consume a large amount of disk space. A log file grows without bound unless action is taken and this can cause many problems. For example, larger files are harder to manipulate, your file system may run out of space or the information you log may constitute personal data.
A solution to log file growth is log rotation. You need to periodically rotate the log files by moving or deleting the existing logs. Log file rotation aims to prevent log files from growing indefinitely. Log files can be rotated daily or weekly. This involves moving of an existing log file to some other file name and starting fresh with an empty log file. After a period the old log files are removed.
The logs are stored in the 'logs' directory of the user's home directory. They are as follows:
- domain_name.access.log - the information concerning all the requests from the Net and web-server responses. This information relates to WWW domain and is kept in this file.
- domain_name.error.log - the information concerning web-server errors. This information relates to WWW domain and is kept in this file.
Select the required WWW domain, click the "Logs" icon and fill out the form.
Module «WWW domains»
- Access log - select whether you wish to enable web-server access log and rotate it
- Error log - specify whether you want to store web-server error logs archives and rotate it.
- Rotation period - select the period for logs rotation (daily, every hour, every day, every week, every month, by size).
- Size - provide the maximum size of the file (in MB).
- Store archives - provide the number of log file archives to be stored on the server. Disk space occupied by the archives is included into the user quota.
- Analyse with - from the drop-down menu select a program to be used for information processing.
- Analysis period - provide the period for logs rotation.