Where is my PostgreSQL logs?

Here’s how to find the location of the postgres logs on my machine, setting them to logging everything, and watching it’s output.

1. Finding postgres log location

(Personal TLDR: try /usr/local/var/log/postgres.log or /opt/homebrew/var/log/postgres.log)

You can query your database settings to see where logs are stored.

• Open psql shell as superuser with psql.
• (Optionally) connect to database with \c mydb

Display log directory with ```sql select setting from pg_settings where name =‘log_directory’; setting

---

log

It may return an absolute path (like `/usr/local/var/log`), or a relative path like `log` above.
In the case of a relative path, it's from the data directory. You can find the data directory with

```sql
SHOW data_directory;
    data_directory
-------------------------
/usr/local/var/postgres

The log is then located in /usr/local/var/log/postgres.log.

2. Logging everything

Note: this is not a great idea in unless you’re debugging locally. It’ll punish your performance.

You can see the last logs with tail /usr/local/var/log/postgres.log

By default, only errors are logged here. To turn on logging every query, find your config file.

psql
> SHOW data_directory;
>     data_directory
> -------------------------
> /usr/local/var/postgres

Your config file is then in /usr/local/var/postgres/postgres.conf. Here, set

log_statement = 'all'

And restart your postgres with pg_ctl reload (or brew services restart postgresql).

3. Watch new logs

# log location from step 1
tail -f /usr/local/var/log/postgres.log