Keep FileMaker Server Web Logs at Fixed Paths

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques, Web Development
If you need to scrounge through the web server’s logs in the file system, the way FileMaker Server stores these on Mac OS can be a bit annoying. You end up with a bunch of files named like this:
access_log.1428958196
access_log.1428958346
access_log.1428958354
access_log.1428959999
access_log.1428961279
access_log.1430394547
access_log.1430424173
error_log.1428958367
error_log.1428959582
error_log.1428962420
error_log.1430376447
error_log.1430421531
error_log.1430438275
error_log.1430438850
fmsadminserver_access_log.1428958145
fmsadminserver_access_log.1428958321
fmsadminserver_access_log.1428958351
...

 

This presents two problems. First, its difficult to tease out the name of the most recent log, although the shell’s autocomplete helps with that a bit.

 

But the more important issue for me was that it makes somewhere between difficult and impossible to use tools like logwatch or fail2ban to monitor these files. Neither of them handle the default arrangement well. In the case of fail2ban, it may appear to work initially, but does not pick up any newly created log files until restarted.

FileMaker’s version of the Apache configuration lives inside the directory at:

/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/conf

For each log file there will be a line similar to this using the rotatelogs command:

ErrorLog "||/usr/sbin/rotatelogs '/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/logs/error_log' 10M"
This puts Apache’s rotatelogs command in control of how how the files are managed, using its default naming convention for log rotations. My first thought was to modify the Apache configuration, perhaps even using newsyslog instead of rotatelogs to manage the files.

Unfortunately, changing the naming method breaks the ability to display the logs in the FMS Admin Console. Also unfortunate is that Mac OS versions prior to Yosemite use the older Apache 2.2, and the rotatelogs command in that version supports only a few options.

However, for systems that are running on Yosemite, the rotatelogs command has an option that can easily give us what we need. from the logrotate man page:

-L linkname
Causes a hard link to be made from the current logfile to the specified link name. This can be used to watch the log continuously across rotations using a command like tail -F linkname.
Taking the configuration line we used as an example above, we change this to:
ErrorLog "||/usr/sbin/rotatelogs -L '/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/logs/error_log' '/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/logs/error_log' 10M"
After that change we now get the following:
error_log
error_log.1428958204
error_log.1428958347
error_log.1428958357
error_log.1428958367
error_log.1428959582
error_log.1428962420
error_log.1430376447
error_log.1430421531
error_log.1430438275
error_log.1430438850

Now accessing the file at error_log will always give us the most recent version of these logs. Perfect!

In total there are 8 lines and three files that need changes. These are:

  • /Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/conf/extra/httpd-fmsadminserver.conf:ErrorLog “||/usr/sbin/rotatelogs ‘/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/logs/fmsadminserver_error_log’ 10M”
  • /Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/conf/extra/httpd-fmsadminserver.conf:TransferLog “||/usr/sbin/rotatelogs ‘/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/logs/fmsadminserver_access_log’ 10M”
  • /Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/conf/extra/httpd-fmsadminserver.conf:CustomLog “||/usr/sbin/rotatelogs ‘/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/logs/fmsadminserver_ssl_request_log’ 10M” secure
  • /Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf:ErrorLog “||/usr/sbin/rotatelogs ‘/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/logs/ssl_error_log’ 10M”
  • /Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf:TransferLog “||/usr/sbin/rotatelogs ‘/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/logs/ssl_access_log’ 10M”
  • /Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf:CustomLog “||/usr/sbin/rotatelogs ‘/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/logs/ssl_request_log’ 10M” secure
  • /Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/conf/httpd.conf:ErrorLog “||/usr/sbin/rotatelogs ‘/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/logs/error_log’ 10M”
  • /Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/conf/httpd.conf: CustomLog “||/usr/sbin/rotatelogs ‘/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/logs/access_log’ 10M” common
If you happen to make any mistakes, one situation to watch for is that the web based services like WebDirect will work initially, but then fail around midnight. In my case, I had the following logged in error_log:
Invalid rotation size parameter
Simon.

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