How to enable Logs in MySQL

Logs are the best part to start troubleshooting.In this article we will show you how to enable the different type of logs into MySQL server:

Error Log:

It contains all the information about MySQL errors.To enable MySQL error log edit MySQL configuration file and update following setting as per your requirements.

[mysqld]
log_error = /var/log/mysql/error.log

General Log:

General logs contain all the records of MySQL activities like (queries , connect, disconnect) To enable general logs in MySQL, edit configuration file and uncomment following lines to enable general logs and change log file path to create log on different directory.

general_log_file = /var/log/mysql/mysql.log
general_log = 1

Slow Query Log:

As indicated by its name,It consists of  “slow” SQL statements.To enable Slow Query Log, uncomment or add the following line in [mysqld] section.

log_slow_queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log
long_query_time = 2
log-queries-not-using-indexes

Restart MySQL:

After making above changes, restart MySQL services by using one of the following command :

service mysql restart
or
systemctl restart mysql.service

Done.