2.1.3 Logging

When it encounters a difficulty, Polipo will print a friendly message. The location where these messages go is controlled by the configuration variables logFile and logSyslog. If logSyslog is true, error messages go to the system log facility given by logFacility. If logFile is set, it is the name of a file where all output will accumulate. If logSyslog is false and logFile is empty, messages go to the error output of the process (normally the terminal).

The variable logFile defaults to empty if daemonise is false, and to ‘/var/log/polipo’ otherwise. The variable logSyslog defaults to false, and logFacility defaults to ‘user’.

If logFile is set, then the variable logFilePermissions controls the Unix permissions with which the log file will be created if it doesn’t exist. It defaults to 0640.

The amount of logging is controlled by the variable logLevel. Please see the file ‘log.h’ in the Polipo sources for the possible values of logLevel.

Keeping extensive logs on your users browsing habits is probably a serere violation of their privacy. If the variable scrubLogs is set, then Polipo will scrub most, if not all, private information from its logs.