I have been providing syslog-ng users with weekly git snapshot RPM packages for almost a decade. From now on, RHEL & Co users can use nightly packages provided by the syslog-ng team, and from a lot less obscure location. As usual, these packages are for testing, not for production.
Before you begin
As you might recall from my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/rpm-packages-from-syslog-ng-git-head/, I provide regular syslog-ng git snapshot packages for Fedora, openSUSE and RHEL (and compatibles). I do most of my syslog-ng related work on Fedora, FreeBSD and openSUSE (alphabetical order :-) ).
However, the vast majority of syslog-ng users actually run syslog-ng on RHEL and compatible operating systems. Because of this, I will keep updating my personal repositories, but most likely less often, as most users will receive regularly updated packages.
So, what is supported in the new repository? RHEL 8, 9, and 10, together with compatible operating systems on x86_64 an Aarch64 (64bit ARM) architectures.
Installing syslog-ng
Prerequisites: Make sure that the EPEL (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/epel/) repository is enabled on your host.
Download the repo file from https://ose-repo.syslog-ng.com/yum/syslog-ng-ose-nightly.repo and save it to the /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory.
You are now ready to install syslog-ng:
dnf install syslog-ng
This will install the core syslog-ng, with minimal dependencies. You can list all the available syslog-ng sub-packages:
dnf search syslog-ng
Testing
Unless you are testing on the day after release, you should see a syslog-ng version with a very long version number, including some letters at the end:
[root@localhost ~]# syslog-ng -V syslog-ng 4 (4.9.0.113.g52b6201) Config version: 4.2 Installer-Version: 4.9.0.113.g52b6201 Revision: Compile-Date: Jul 16 2025 00:00:00 [...]
Note that the compile date can be older, if there were no commits to the syslog-ng sources on the previous day(s).
Make sure that syslog-ng is up and running, and then send some test messages:
[root@localhost ~]# systemctl restart syslog-ng [root@localhost ~]# logger bla [root@localhost ~]# tail /var/log/messages […] Sep 9 13:48:41 localhost.localdomain root[3025]: bla […]
What is next?
As already mentioned in the introduction, nightly packages are for testing new features and bug fixes. They are not intended for production purposes. Nonetheless, every commit in the syslog-ng code base goes through thousands of test cases, so you should be safe in most cases. If you still run into any trouble, do not hesitate to report the issue at https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/issues.
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If you have questions or comments related to syslog-ng, do not hesitate to contact us. You can reach us by email or even chat with us.
For a list of possibilities, check our GitHub page under the “Community” section at https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.
On Twitter, I am available as @PCzanik, on Mastodon as @Pczanik@fosstodon.org.