Logging

Prosody's logging configuration is very flexible. For those who want something simple however, this is also easy.

All log messages in Prosody have a 'level', which is basically a priority/urgency indicator. Most messages Prosody generates are at the 'debug' level, and can be safely ignored, unless you are trying to diagnose and/or report an issue. The next level is 'info', which is given to normal everyday messages about things happening on the server - client/server connections, for example. Two higher levels, 'warn' and 'error' show potential problems. A message of 'warn' usually does not require any action to be taken, and may indicate a bug in a client or server that Prosody is connected to. A message of type 'error' is potentially quite serious, and all such messages should be investigated by an administrator.

Logging to a single file

Now, many people simply want Prosody to log to a file. This is easy… in your config put:

   log = "prosody.log" -- Can be any filename

Prosody will automatically log all messages with a level of 'info' and higher, that is… all messages except the noisy 'debug' level.

Logging to a single sink

Apart from files, Prosody modules can provide log 'sinks' where Prosody can send log messages. For example Prosody comes with a 'console' sink built-in and mod_posix provides a 'syslog' sink.

To log everything to a sink, simply set the log option to the sink name prefixed by '*', like this:

   log = "*syslog" -- Requires mod_posix to be loaded

All messages will be sent to syslog if it is selected, which allows you to filter messages using syslog.conf instead.

Split logging

If you want to send different log levels to different files or sinks, you can use a slightly more advanced config format:

   log = {
       debug = "/var/log/prosody/prosody.log"; -- Send debug and higher here
       error = "*syslog"; -- Send error and higher to the syslog sink
   }

The supported levels are: "debug", "info", "warn", "error".

Log rotation

Log rotation is the process of creating new log files and archiving the old ones on a regular basis to make sure that the log files do not get too large.

Prosody is compatible with tools like logrotate, which should work automatically if you installed Prosody using a pre-built package. If you installed Prosody from source or if your system package did not set up log rotation please see our documentation on logging for packagers, which includes an example logrotate configuration for Prosody.

Going further

For the adventurous, Prosody also offers a more Advanced logging configuration format for even more flexibility.

Hopefully this covers all you wanted to know about Prosody's logging, if you have any remaining questions, just remember to ask 😄