Logs

This is archived documentation for InfluxData product versions that are no longer maintained. For newer documentation, see the latest InfluxData documentation.

InfluxDB writes log output, by default, to stderr. Depending on your use case, this log information can be written to another location.

Running InfluxDB directly

If you run InfluxDB directly, using influxd, all logs will be written to stderr. You may redirect this log output as you would any output to stderr like so:

influxd 2>$HOME/my_log_file

Launched as a service

If InfluxDB was installed using a pre-built package, and then launched as a service, stderr is redirected to /var/log/influxdb/influxd.log, and all log data will be written to that file. You can override this location by setting the variable STDERR in the file /etc/default/influxdb.

Note: On macOS the logs, by default, are stored in the file /usr/local/var/log/influxdb.log

For example, if /etc/default/influxdb contains:

STDERR=/dev/null

all log data will be discarded. You can similarly direct output to stdout by setting STDOUT in the same file. Output to stdout is sent to /dev/null by default when InfluxDB is launched as a service.

InfluxDB must be restarted to pick up any changes to /etc/default/influxdb.

Using logrotate

You can use logrotate to rotate the log files generated by InfluxDB. If using the package install, the config file for logrotate is installed in /etc/logrotate.d. You can view the file here.