Knowledge Base

Retired: Modifying the http.log Format on Neo4j 2.x

Prior to Neo4j 3.0, the http.log format was controlled by neo4j-http-logging.xml. The default format works fine, except when you need to diagnose problematic long-running queries. The HTTP requests to the /db/data/cypher or /db/data/transaction endpoints do not log the json payload with the Cypher query, which might be helpful in some situations.

The format layout options can be found in the source code here.

For example, to log the cypher query, log the full request. To enable this, in the conf/neo4j-http-logging.xml file, you need to modify it as follows:

<pattern>%h %l %user [%t{dd/MMM/yyyy:HH:mm:ss Z}] "%r" %s %b "%i{Referer}" "%i{User-Agent}" %fullRequest %D</pattern>

Note: Only change this during debugging, and then set the pattern back to the default. Otherwise, logging every full request will increase the I/O on the storage and could result in a performance impact.