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Show journal logs for a single service

harmless rootLogsdebian, ubuntu
Adjust the values, the command updates live
root@server
journalctl -u nginx -n 200 --no-pager

Filters the journal to one unit and prints the last 200 lines without a pager. This is usually the fastest way to the cause when a service fails to start or crashes. Using -f instead of -n 200 shows new messages live.

Note: -u can be given multiple times, for example -u nginx -u apache2, to see how both services interact.

Also searched as

  • show logs of a service
  • why does nginx not start
  • journalctl for one service
  • find mariadb error message

Related one-liners

All in Logs

Show logs from the previous boot

#journalctl -b -1 -n 200 --no-pager
harmlessLogs

Show only error messages in the system journal

#journalctl -p err -b --no-pager
harmlessLogs

Show system logs since a specific time

#journalctl --since "1 hour ago" --no-pager
harmlessLogs

Count IP addresses blocked by ufw

#journalctl -k --since "today" --no-pager | grep 'UFW BLOCK' | grep -o 'SRC=[^ ]*' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20
harmlessFirewall

Detect whether the server is virtual or a container

$systemd-detect-virt
harmlessSystem and hardware

Find processes killed by the OOM killer

#journalctl -k --no-pager | grep -iE "out of memory|oom-kill|killed process"
harmlessProcesses

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