Last week, I described why and how to install the latest stable syslog-ng RPM packages. There are some situations, when even the latest stable release is not good enough. If you have any issues with the latest stable release, there is a good chance that it is already fixed in git.

Development of syslog-ng happens on GitHub: https://github.com/balabit/syslog-ng/. The latest commit in Git is called the HEAD. From now on, I will try to create packages regularly from the latest Git sources.

Warning: while there are many precautions taken to ensure that there are no defects introduced to syslog-ng during development (including automatic testing and code reviews), you can use these packages only at your own risk. Do not be surprised if it eats your machine for breakfast!

These packages are not intended for production use, rather to verify that the issues that you may have encountered in stable releases have been fixed. They can change frequently and sometimes even include experimental, not yet merged patches (by the time of writing: OpenSSL 1.1 support).

For information on other platforms that could be relevant to you, check out all my blog posts about installing syslog-ng on major Linux distributions, collected in one place.

In addition, syslog-ng is also available as a Docker image. To learn more, read our tutorial about logging in Docker using syslog-ng.

Installing syslog-ng on RHEL 9 & compatibles and Fedora

Download the .repo file belonging to your distribution version from https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/czanik/syslog-ng-githead/.

In case of installing syslog-ng on RHEL 9, enter the following commands:

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/czanik/syslog-ng-githead/repo/epel-9/czanik-syslog-ng-githead-epel-9.repo

From now, on you can install syslog-ng and its sub packages from the “githead” repository with yum or dnf.

Installing syslog-ng on SLES and openSUSE

Installation steps are almost the same as described in my previous blog post. This repository contains all the necessary dependencies, you only have to change the URL compared to the previous post: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:czanik:syslog-ng-githead.

For example, if you want to install syslog-ng on openSUSE Leap 15.6, enter the following command:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/czanik:/syslog-ng-githead/15.6/ syslog-ng-githead

From now, on you can install syslog-ng and its sub packages from the “githead” repository with zypper.