Notes about the configuration syntax

When you are editing the syslog-ng.conf configuration file, note the following points:

• The configuration file can contain a maximum of 6665 source / destination / log elements.

• When writing the names of options and parameters (or other reserved words), the hyphen (-) and underscore (_) characters are equivalent, for example, max-connections(10) and max_connections(10) are both correct.

• Numbers can be prefixed with + or - to indicate positive or negative values. Numbers beginning with zero (0) or 0x are treated as octal or hexadecimal numbers, respectively.

  Starting with AxoSyslog version 3.5, you can use suffixes for kilo-, mega-, and gigabytes. Use the Kb, Mb, or Gb suffixes for the base-10 version, and Kib, Mib, or Gib for the base-2 version. That is, 2MB means 2000000, while 2MiB means 2097152. For example, to set the log-msg-size() option to 2000000 bytes, use log-msg-size(2Mb).

• You can use commas (,) to separate options or other parameters for readability, AxoSyslog completely ignores them. The following declarations are equivalent:

      source s_demo_stream {
          unix-stream("<path-to-socket>" max-connections(10) group(log));
      };
      source s_demo_stream {
          unix-stream("<path-to-socket>", max-connections(10), group(log));
      };
  

• When enclosing object IDs (for example, the name of a destination) between double-quotes ("mydestination"), the ID can include whitespace as well, for example:

      source "s demo stream" {
          unix-stream("<path-to-socket>" max-connections(10) group(log));
      };
  

• For notes on using regular expressions, see Regular expressions.

• You can use if {}, elif {}, and else {} blocks to configure conditional expressions. For details, see if-else-elif: Conditional expressions.