ServerName in Apache2 logs

Question

I'm running apache2.4 on my Ubuntu 16.04 machine. I have set up two Document root each with different ServerName in /etc/apache2/sites-available. Is there anyway to configure the logs to capture the ServerName too because I want to know to site the request is made or log the DocumentRoot.

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName www.first.com
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        DocumentRoot /var/www/first
        LogFormat "%{Host}i%U%q" combined
        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

I have set www.first.com to 127.0.0.1 in the same Ubunutu box and I'm trying to access www.first.com from the same box. The access.log still don't show www.first.com. Any thoughts ?

Answer 1

My grasp from the Custom Log Formats chapter is that you need the %v format string:

%v  The canonical ServerName of the server serving the request.

That means that a virtual host like:

ServerName example.com
ServerAlias example.net
ServerAlias example.org

... always gets logged as example.com no matter the entry point.

Also, the standard combined nickname is this:

"%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\""

You're certainly allowed to edit it but it's kind of confusing. You may want to assign a different name, as in the LogFormat example:

LogFormat "%v %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" vhost_common