In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Logwatch on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Logwatch is a customizable, pluggable log-monitoring system. It will go through your logs for a given period of time and generate a report and then mail the details to your email.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Logwatch monitoring log file on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install Logwatch on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa
Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade
Step 2. Installing Logwatch on Ubuntu 20.04.
By default, Logwatch is available to the official Ubuntu repositories. Now run the following command below to install it to your system:
sudo apt install logwatch
After the installation is completed, you can confirm it using the command below:
logwatch --version
Step 3. Configure Logwatch.
Now we create a temporary directory for Logwatch to work:
sudo mkdir /var/cache/logwatch
Configuration shouldn’t be edited in the install directory (/usr/share/logwatch). Copy logwatch.conf to /etc/logwatch before editing:
sudo cp /usr/share/logwatch/default.conf/logwatch.conf /etc/logwatch/conf/
Basic customization is:
Output = file|mail|stdout MailTo = my-email@your-domain.com MailFrom = logwatch@your-domain.com Detail = Low, Med, High, or a number Service = All Service = service-name Range = Yesterday|Today|All Format = text|html
To run the Logwatch manually at any time, you can use the command below:
logwatch
A summary of the command-line switches described on the man page can be obtained with the ‘--help‘ option:
logwatch --help
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Logwatch. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Logwatch on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Logwatch website.
