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Since version 1.99, Synapse is now maintained by Element under a new licence (github.com/element-hq/synapse).

If you are interested in the documentation for a later version of Synapse, please click here to navigate to this same page on the latest Element Synapse documentation site, if it's available.

Logging Sample Configuration File

Below is a sample logging configuration file. This file can be tweaked to control how your homeserver will output logs. The value of the log_config option in your homeserver config should be the path to this file.

To apply changes made to this file, send Synapse a SIGHUP signal (or, if using systemd, run systemctl reload on the Synapse service).

Note that a default logging configuration (shown below) is created automatically alongside the homeserver config when following the installation instructions. It should be named <SERVERNAME>.log.config by default.

# Log configuration for Synapse.
#
# This is a YAML file containing a standard Python logging configuration
# dictionary. See [1] for details on the valid settings.
#
# Synapse also supports structured logging for machine readable logs which can
# be ingested by ELK stacks. See [2] for details.
#
# [1]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/logging.config.html#configuration-dictionary-schema
# [2]: https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/structured_logging.html

version: 1

formatters:
    precise:
        format: '%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(lineno)d - %(levelname)s - %(request)s - %(message)s'

handlers:
    file:
        class: logging.handlers.TimedRotatingFileHandler
        formatter: precise
        filename: /var/log/matrix-synapse/homeserver.log
        when: midnight
        backupCount: 3  # Does not include the current log file.
        encoding: utf8

    # Default to buffering writes to log file for efficiency.
    # WARNING/ERROR logs will still be flushed immediately, but there will be a
    # delay (of up to `period` seconds, or until the buffer is full with
    # `capacity` messages) before INFO/DEBUG logs get written.
    buffer:
        class: synapse.logging.handlers.PeriodicallyFlushingMemoryHandler
        target: file

        # The capacity is the maximum number of log lines that are buffered
        # before being written to disk. Increasing this will lead to better
        # performance, at the expensive of it taking longer for log lines to
        # be written to disk.
        # This parameter is required.
        capacity: 10

        # Logs with a level at or above the flush level will cause the buffer to
        # be flushed immediately.
        # Default value: 40 (ERROR)
        # Other values: 50 (CRITICAL), 30 (WARNING), 20 (INFO), 10 (DEBUG)
        flushLevel: 30  # Flush immediately for WARNING logs and higher

        # The period of time, in seconds, between forced flushes.
        # Messages will not be delayed for longer than this time.
        # Default value: 5 seconds
        period: 5

    # A handler that writes logs to stderr. Unused by default, but can be used
    # instead of "buffer" and "file" in the logger handlers.
    console:
        class: logging.StreamHandler
        formatter: precise

loggers:
    synapse.storage.SQL:
        # beware: increasing this to DEBUG will make synapse log sensitive
        # information such as access tokens.
        level: INFO

root:
    level: INFO

    # Write logs to the `buffer` handler, which will buffer them together in memory,
    # then write them to a file.
    #
    # Replace "buffer" with "console" to log to stderr instead.
    #
    handlers: [buffer]

disable_existing_loggers: false