How to follow what’s going on in your Apache server logs (linux)
At the command line type:
tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log
As apache requests are received you’ll see information about them appear on screen.
Can’t find the log file?
Try this:
find /var -name access.log 2>/dev/null
This searches for the file “access.log” in the /var directory and sub-directories. The “2>..” on the end is a really neat trick which directs all error messages to /dev/null so you don’t get messages about permission denied on directory traversal.
If this doesn’t find the file then it’s probably not in /var so try:
find / -name access.log 2>/dev/null
Which will search from /
Combine the find command with the tail command
tail -f `find /var -name access.log 2>/dev/null`
Note the wierd backtick character around the find.
Filtering the results
If you’re looking for something in particular then pipe the results through grep to filter on a string:
tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | grep login.php
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