Where can I find the error logs of nginx, using FastCGI and Django?

Errors are stored in the nginx log file. You can specify it in the root of the nginx configuration file:

error_log  /var/log/nginx/nginx_error.log  warn;

On Mac OS X with Homebrew, the log file was found by default at the following location:

/usr/local/var/log/nginx

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I was looking for a different solution.

Error logs, by default, before any configuration is set, on my system (x86 Arch Linux), was found in:

/var/log/nginx/error.log

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You can use lsof (list of open files) in most cases to find open log files without knowing the configuration.

Example:

Find the PID of httpd (the same concept applies for nginx and other programs):

$ ps aux | grep httpd
...
root     17970  0.0  0.3 495964 64388 ?        Ssl  Oct29   3:45 /usr/sbin/httpd
...

Then search for open log files using lsof with the PID:

$ lsof -p 17970 | grep log
httpd   17970 root    2w   REG             253,15     2278      6723 /var/log/httpd/error_log
httpd   17970 root   12w   REG             253,15        0      1387 /var/log/httpd/access_log

If lsof prints nothing, even though you expected the log files to be found, issue the same command using sudo.

You can read a little more here.

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Run this command, to check error logs:

tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log

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My ngninx logs are located here:

/usr/local/var/log/nginx/*

You can also check your nginx.conf to see if you have any directives dumping to custom log.

run nginx -t to locate your nginx.conf.

# in ngingx.conf
error_log  /usr/local/var/log/nginx/error.log;
error_log  /usr/local/var/log/nginx/error.log  notice;
error_log  /usr/local/var/log/nginx/error.log  info;

Nginx is usually set up in /usr/local or /etc/. The server could be configured to dump logs to /var/log as well.

If you have an alternate location for your nginx install and all else fails, you could use the find command to locate your file of choice.

find /usr/ -path "*/nginx/*" -type f -name '*.log', where /usr/ is the folder you wish to start searching from.

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Logs location on Linux servers:

Apache – /var/log/httpd/

IIS – C:\inetpub\wwwroot\

Node.js – /var/log/nodejs/

nginx – /var/log/nginx/

Passenger – /var/app/support/logs/

Puma – /var/log/puma/

Python – /opt/python/log/

Tomcat – /var/log/tomcat8

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Type this command in the terminal:

sudo cat /var/log/nginx/error.log

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cd /var/log/nginx/
cat error.log

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For Mac OS users, you can type nginx -help in your terminal.

nginx version: nginx/1.21.0
Usage: nginx [-?hvVtTq] [-s signal] [-p prefix]
             [-e filename] [-c filename] [-g directives]

Options:
  -?,-h         : this help
  -v            : show version and exit
  -V            : show version and configure options then exit
  -t            : test configuration and exit
  -T            : test configuration, dump it and exit
  -q            : suppress non-error messages during configuration testing
  -s signal     : send signal to a master process: stop, quit, reopen, reload
  -p prefix     : set prefix path (default: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/nginx/1.21.0/)
  -e filename   : set error log file (default: /opt/homebrew/var/log/nginx/error.log)
  -c filename   : set configuration file (default: /opt/homebrew/etc/nginx/nginx.conf)
  -g directives : set global directives out of configuration file

Then, you could find some default path for configuration and log files, in this case:

/opt/homebrew/log/nginx/error.log

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It is a good practice to set where the access log should be in nginx configuring file . Using acces_log /path/ Like this.

keyval $remote_addr:$http_user_agent $seen zone=clients;

server { listen 443 ssl;

ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
ssl_ciphers   HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5;

if ($seen = "") {
    set $seen  1;
    set $logme 1;
}
access_log  /tmp/sslparams.log sslparams if=$logme;
error_log  /pathtolog/error.log;
# ...
}

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I found it in /usr/local/nginx/logs/*.

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