Starting logactio

The only requirement logactio have to be able to start, is the configuration file which declares log files to watch, what to look for and how to report when it finds a match. The default location for this file is /etc/logactio.cfg, but this can be overridden by the command line.

For a normal production setup where the configuration file is in the default location, this would be sufficient

[user@host: ~]$ logactio -d

Otherwise, you can tweak logactio a bit.

[user@host: ~]$ logactio --help
usage: logactio [-h] [-d] [-p PID-FILE] [--stdout-redir FILE] [-c FILE] [-v]
                [-L {syslog,file,stdout}] [-l LOG-FILE] [-s SYSLOG-NAME]
                [--trace]

Simple framework for executing actions on certain log events

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -d, --daemon          Run as a daemon
  -p, --pid-file PID-FILE
                        Put pid file of logactio in this file
  --stdout-redir FILE   Redirect all stdout data to this file (only active
                        when running as daemon)
  -c, --config FILE     Configuration file for logactio (Default:
                        /etc/logactio.cfg)
  -v, --verbose         Increase the log verbosity
  -L, --log-type {syslog,file,stdout}
                        Should logging go to file or syslog? (default: syslog)
  -l, --log-file LOG-FILE
                        Filename of the log file to use
  -s, --syslog-id SYSLOG-NAME
                        syslog ident to use for syslog events
  --trace               On errors, show a backtrace

If you do not have the configuration file in the standard location, you may override this as well with –config=/path/to/my/config.

The only privileges logactio requires is to be able to read the configured log files. Logactio will never try to write to these files. If you use –pid-file logactio needs to have write access to the destination directory for the pid file.

By default logactio will do all logging via syslog. If you want to log to a separate file, add the –log-type=file and –log-file=/path/to/my/log.file. When logactio writes to syslog, they are tagged with logactio. This may be modified with the –syslog-id argument. To log to stdout, use –log-type=stdout

If you want to run logactio as a daemon, add the –daemon argument as well.

For debugging, adding –trace and –stdout-redir=/path/to/logactio-stdout.log may be useful to understand what happens. Also adding more -v arguments will gradually increase the log verbosity.