25.3. Log File Maintenance
It is a good idea to save the database server's log output somewhere, rather than just discarding it via
/dev/null
. The log output is invaluable when diagnosing problems.
Note
The server log can contain sensitive information and needs to be protected, no matter how or where it is stored, or the destination to which it is routed. For example, some DDL statements might contain plaintext passwords or other authentication details. Logged statements at the
ERROR
level might show the SQL source code for applications and might also contain some parts of data rows. Recording data, events and related information is the intended function of this facility, so this is not a leakage or a bug. Please ensure the server logs are visible only to appropriately authorized people.
Log output tends to be voluminous (especially at higher debug levels) so you won't want to save it indefinitely. You need to
rotate
the log files so that new log files are started and old ones removed after a reasonable period of time.
If you simply direct the
stderr
of
postgres
into a file, you will have log output, but the only way to truncate the log file is to stop and restart the server. This might be acceptable if you are using
PostgreSQL
in a development environment, but few production servers would find this behavior acceptable.
A better approach is to send the server's
stderr
output to some type of log rotation program. There is a built-in log rotation facility, which you can use by setting the configuration parameter
logging_collector
to
true
in
postgresql.conf
. The control parameters for this program are described in Section 20.8.1. You can also use this approach to capture the log data in machine readable
CSV
(comma-separated values) format.
Alternatively, you might prefer to use an external log rotation program if you have one that you are already using with other server software. For example, the
rotatelogs
tool included in the
Apache
distribution can be used with
PostgreSQL
. One way to do this is to pipe the server's
stderr
output to the desired program. If you start the server with
pg_ctl
, then
stderr
is already redirected to
stdout
, so you just need a pipe command, for example:
pg_ctl start | rotatelogs /var/log/pgsql_log 86400
You can combine these approaches by setting up
logrotate
to collect log files produced by
PostgreSQL
built-in logging collector. In this case, the logging collector defines the names and location of the log files, while
logrotate
periodically archives these files. When initiating log rotation,
logrotate
must ensure that the application sends further output to the new file. This is commonly done with a
postrotate
script that sends a
SIGHUP
signal to the application, which then reopens the log file. In
PostgreSQL
, you can run
pg_ctl
with the
logrotate
option instead. When the server receives this command, the server either switches to a new log file or reopens the existing file, depending on the logging configuration (see Section 20.8.1).
Note
When using static log file names, the server might fail to reopen the log file if the max open file limit is reached or a file table overflow occurs. In this case, log messages are sent to the old log file until a successful log rotation. If
logrotate
is configured to compress the log file and delete it, the server may lose the messages logged in this time frame. To avoid this issue, you can configure the logging collector to dynamically assign log file names and use a
prerotate
script to ignore open log files.
Another production-grade approach to managing log output is to send it to
syslog
and let
syslog
deal with file rotation. To do this, set the configuration parameter
log_destination
to
syslog
(to log to
syslog
only) in
postgresql.conf
. Then you can send a
SIGHUP
signal to the
syslog
daemon whenever you want to force it to start writing a new log file. If you want to automate log rotation, the
logrotate
program can be configured to work with log files from
syslog
.
On many systems, however,
syslog
is not very reliable, particularly with large log messages; it might truncate or drop messages just when you need them the most. Also, on
Linux
,
syslog
will flush each message to disk, yielding poor performance. (You can use a
“
-
”
at the start of the file name in the
syslog
configuration file to disable syncing.)
Note that all the solutions described above take care of starting new log files at configurable intervals, but they do not handle deletion of old, no-longer-useful log files. You will probably want to set up a batch job to periodically delete old log files. Another possibility is to configure the rotation program so that old log files are overwritten cyclically.
pgBadger
is an external project that does sophisticated log file analysis.
check_postgres
provides Nagios alerts when important messages appear in the log files, as well as detection of many other extraordinary conditions.