Logging incoming requests and errors

A server hosting a website on the Internet gets a lot of attention. It's visited by users, scanned by indexing search bots, and looked over by would-be attackers trying to see if it could be broken into. Your web server should record information about all this traffic, and you should look through it regularly to ascertain that everything is working correctly.

By default, Apache keeps two types of logfiles: an access log, which contains information about each incoming request and an error log with information about encountered problems. You can configure Apache to keep a single pair of logfiles, but in most cases it's more useful to keep a separate access and error log for each virtual server.

Getting ready

Apache's logging facility is highly customizable, and you can set your server to output log entries in many different ways. A few of the formats have become recognized as standard, and currently, the recommended logging standard is nicknamed combined log...