How to setup Varnish logging?

logging varnish
Muneeb Nasir picture Muneeb Nasir · Oct 3, 2012 · Viewed 38.7k times · Source

I want to get Varnish to log requests. I found the command varnishlog -a -w /var/log/varnish.log, but it does not log anything.

Then I found that Varnish does not write to log by default. However I am unable to find configuration options for logging.

Answer

Ketola picture Ketola · Oct 3, 2012

If you want to log HTTP requests in NCSA Common Log Format you need to use varnishncsa. On CentOS/RedHat, the Varnish RPM package includes a varnishncsa init script that you can use to start logging. By default it logs to logfile="/var/log/varnish/varnishncsa.log".

Additionally if you wish to serve several different hosts through a single Varnish install, you'll want to include the host name in the log as well. This can be accomplished with the following setting in /etc/sysconfig/varnishncsa

DAEMON_OPTS="$DAEMON_OPTS -F '%{Host}i %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\"'"

Please note that the method described in the link by Anshu only logs the requests that are passed through by Varnish to the backend servers. Cache hit requests will never be recorded (before Varnish 5.0 - see below). Therefore the HTTPD logs gathered this way cannot be used for statistical analysis.

Update: As @VikrantPogula mentioned, as of Varnish 5.0 all client requests are logged - including cache hits. This is the default behavior, and can be switched on explicitly using the -c switch.

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