The Wildcard That Broke Nginx Log Rotation

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One of those infrastructure problems that looks simple, until you realize the filename itself is part of the problem.

The Setup

We had Nginx configured to handle wildcard subdomains: server_name *.example.com;, with access logs named after the server block. That’s a convenient pattern for multi-tenant setups where subdomains get created dynamically and you don’t want to hand-maintain a vhost file per tenant. Nginx doesn’t care that the resulting log filename contains a literal * - it just opens the file and writes to it.

Nginx on Alexander's Blog

The Wildcard That Broke Nginx Log Rotation

The Setup