Installing rsyslog from Package

Package Availability

Rsyslog is included in all major distributions. So you do not necessarily need to take care of where packages can be found - they are “just there”. Unfortunately, the distros provide often rather old versions. This is especially the case for so-called enterprise distributions.

As long as you do not run into trouble with one of these old versions, using the distribution-provided packages is easy and a good idea. If you need new features, better performance and sometimes even a fix for a bug that the distro did not backport, you can use alternative packages. Please note that the project team does not support outdated versions. While we probably can help with simple config questions, for anything else we concentrate on current versions.

The rsyslog project offers current packages for a number of major distributions. More information about these can be found at the rsyslog package downloads page.

If you do not find a suitable package for your distribution, there is no reason to panic. You can use official rsyslog docker containers or install rsyslog from the source tarball.

Package Structure

Almost all distributions package rsyslog in multiple packages. This is also the way Adiscon packages are created. The reason is that rsyslog has so many input and output plugins that enable it to connect to different systems like MariaDB/MySQL, Kafka, ElasticSearch and so on. If everything were provided in a single gigantic package, you would need to install all of these dependencies, even though they are mostly not needed.

For that reason, rsyslog comes with multiple packages:

• core package (usually just called “rsyslog”) - this contains core technology that is required as a base for all other packages. It also contains modules like the file writer or syslog forwarder that is extremely often used and has little dependencies.

• feature package (usually called “rsyslog-feature”) - there are multiple of these packages. What exactly is available and how it is named depends on the distro. This unfortunately is a bit inconsistent. Usually, it is a good guess that the package is intuitively named, e.g. “rsyslog-mysql” for the MariaDB/MySQL component and “rsyslog-elasticsearch” for ElasticSearch support. If in doubt, it is suggested to use the distro’s package manager and search for “rsyslog*”.

Contributing

Packaging is a community effort. If you would like to see support for an additional distribution and know how to build packages, please consider contributing to the project and joining the packaging team. Also, rsyslog’s presence on github also contains the sources for the currently maintained packages. They can be found at the rsyslog source project.

Copyright 2008-2023 Rainer Gerhards (Großrinderfeld), and Others.