I wanted to be able to see my NGINX logs for this blog in JSON format, because I'm not sure were I'd like to eventually put them (perhaps Elasticsearch. It's also really nice to be able to read and grok logs quickly with jq. I decided that this was easy enough to add in my logging. In my nginx.conf (typically stored at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf in most linux distributions, you just need to change the default log location to be something similar to this:
log_format json_log '{ "time": "$time_iso8601", ' '"remote_addr": "$remote_addr", ' '"remote_user": "$remote_user", ' '"body_bytes_sent": "$body_bytes_sent", ' '"request_time": "$request_time", ' '"status": "$status", ' '"request": "$request", ' '"request_method": "$request_method", ' '"http_referrer": "$http_referer", ' '"http_user_agent": "$http_user_agent" }';
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log json_log;
This now gives me readable, parsable logs via jq.
tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log | jq .request
"GET /fonts/Inter-UI-Bold.woff2 HTTP/2.0"
"GET /fonts/Inter-UI-Regular.woff2 HTTP/2.0"
"GET /favicon.ico HTTP/2.0"
"GET / HTTP/2.0"
"GET /favicon.ico HTTP/2.0"
"GET /posts/ HTTP/2.0"
"GET /posts/ HTTP/2.0"
"GET /main.min.7bfbbe12786fa0ded4b4c0d792cbb36a5bd0bdb0b856dde57aa7b1f6fe0f2b87.css HTTP/2.0"
"GET /bundle.min.2d5469329143160ae2456a69c3c76dc2d0a3b212b46afe291a51bd68650ed6f8697e001dab54f1c272c77ce08092a8c55e5bb4314e0ee334aab4b927ec896638.js HTTP/2.0"