The syslog-ng OSE application has been resurrected on macOS by our developer team. We hope our product can be useful for Mac users who want to increase the security of their system through reliable logging.

At present we are not supporting macOS syslog-ng OSE on our official repository on GitHub. However, you can install pre-built syslog-ng OSE binaries from various sources or can compile yourself following this guide.

If you want to install syslog-ng OSE on macOS you can use multiple packaga managers e.g. Homebrew

Homebrew

First, check this if you have not got Homebrew installed and pre-configured yet.

Homebrew has now different home directories on ARM and X86 systems, also the location could depend on your macOS version. We will reference to its home directory as ${HOMEBREW_PREFIX} in this document, as if you follow the installation instructions above it will be set already correctly independenty of your system.

Hint: you can use export HOMEBREW_PREFIX=$(brew --prefix) in your scripts or shell environments to get and reference the actual location of your homewbrew installation

Checking dependencies

The syslog-ng OSE package on macOS in homebrew is organized into a formula called syslog-ng.

For checking dependencies of it you can use

brew deps syslog-ng

This will list all the required dependencies are needed to run syslog-ng OSE, and homebrew would install automatically as needed.

Installation

Using homebrew it is simple, use

brew install syslog-ng

This command line refers to the latest distribution of syslog-ng OSE versions at the time of writing, and usually updated quickly by the homwbrew crew after a new release.

Starting syslog-ng

You can start syslog-ng many ways in foreground, e.g. in a terminal window

${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/sbin/syslog-ng -F

this will start it as a foreground process in the terminal and write only minimal information to the console during its run.

To see more details you can specify some debug flags, like

${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/sbin/syslog-ng -Fdevt

this will give you detailed information of what syslog-ng OSE does.

Running syslog-ng OSE as daemon

You can start it manually as a backround daemon

${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/sbin/syslog-ng

however this is not a persistent state, after a system restart syslog-ng OSE will not start automatically by default.

To run it as a daemon that will automatically start at system startup and is kept alive you can use launchd

You can find several pages about launchd and how to add System or User Launch Daemons, Agents to macOS like this, the official Apple Developer page, or simply man launchd, man launchctl, and man launchd.plist

Basic example of how to run it as a System Daemon

  1. Create the following .plist file

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.syslog-ng.daemon</string>
       
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <true/>
       
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
       <string>/opt/homebrew/sbin/syslog-ng</string>
       <string>-F</string>
    </array>

    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/opt/homebrew/var/log/syslog-ng-daemon.stdout.log</string>
    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/opt/homebrew/var/log/syslog-ng-daemon.stderr.log</string>
</dict>
</plist>
  2. name it e.g. com.syslog-ng.daemon.plist, and move it to /Library/LaunchDaemons

  3. Set proper rights on the plist file

    sudo chown root:wheel /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.syslog-ng.daemon.plist
sudo chmod 600 /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.syslog-ng.daemon.plist

That’s all, macOS Launchd will take care of the rest, will start and keepalive the daemon after the next system restart

To start the new daemon immediately without machine restart you can use

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.syslog-ng.daemon.plist

To stop it you can use

sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.syslog-ng.daemon.plist

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