Seperate server logs

Question

We have a live help on our server that generates an insane amount of access logs as you can imagine. Currently they're appended to all of the other access logs for the site they run on. This makes it difficult to sort through the error logs. Is there a way I can specify that anything within /livehelp go into a different log file?

Answer 1

<Directory "/livehelp">
     CustomLog /my/custom/access.log combined
     ErrorLog /my/custom/apache2/error.log
</Directory>

Answer 2

If you move /livehelp to its own VirtualHost (which requires its own HostName) you can customize the logs to keep them separate. You would use the CustomLog and ErrorLog directives to specify the location for those logs.

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName livehelp.example.com
        DocumentRoot /path/to/the/livehelp/folder
        ErrorLog logs/livehelp-error_log
        CustomLog logs/livehelp-access_log combined
</VirtualHost>

Answer 3

You could use the piped log [1] feature of apache. Create a shell script like

#!/bin/sh

PATTERN="/livehelp"
FLAGS="-v"

if [ "x$1" == "xlive" ]; then
  FLAGS=""
fi;

grep $FLAGS "$PATTERN" > $2

(untested and needs improvement)

now add

CustomLog "|/path/to/script live /var/log/live" combined 

and

CustomLog "|/path/to/script std /var/log/std" combined 

to the apache config

you can add some more filtering here if you need

[1] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/logs.html#piped