Caddy is a powerful web server allowing you to serve your sites to the Internet. When exposing websites to the Internet, you want to know what kind of requests you’re receiving. Caddy supports request logging (also known as access logs).

This tutorial shows you how to enable request logging to write an access log for your site.

Caddy Series Overview

Log Requests to a File

Caddy has built-in log support. Use the log directive to enable request logging. The log directive is a block containing three options:

• output: the log destination (stdout, stderr, file, net, etc.)
• format: the log format sent to the destination (console, json)
• level: the log level (info, error)

This tutorial focuses on how to configure the output. We’re skipping the format and level because they have thoughtful default settings.

Write Caddy Logs to a File

You can write the request logs to a file. Configure the log directive to use an output file <path>. A common log destination on Linux is /var/log. We suggest using a dedicated folder for your caddy logs, like /var/logs/caddy.

Here’s a sample configuration logging all incoming requests to a file:

superchargejs.com {  
  log {
    output file /var/log/caddy/superchargejs.com-access.log
  }
}

By default, Caddy rotates log files to prevent disk space exhaustion. Be careful when disabling log rotation. Disabled log rotation for a destination file may continuously grow in size and could cause disk space or writing issues on your system.

Customize Caddy’s Log Rotation Settings

Caddy’s request logging with a file destination has a default configuration of rolling a file at 100MB. By default, it keeps 10 log files for at most 90 days.

You can adjust the default settings to your own needs. For example, you may configure a roll_size of 10MB and keep 20 log files for at most 30 days (720 hours).

Here’s a sample configuration telling Caddy to apply our custom log rotation settings:

superchargejs.com {  
  log {
    output file /var/log/caddy/superchargejs.com-access.log {
        roll_size 10mb
        roll_keep 20
        roll_keep_for 720h
      }
  }
}

Enjoy request logging with Caddy!

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Mentioned Resources

• Caddy docs on the log directive