I’ve been providing syslog-ng users release RPM packages for almost a decade now. However, from now on, RHEL & Co users can use packages provided directly by the syslog-ng team from a lot less obscure location.
Before you begin
As you might recall from my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/installing-latest-syslog-ng-on-rhel-and-other-rpm-distributions, I provide syslog-ng release packages for Fedora, openSUSE and RHEL (and compatibles). I do most of my syslog-ng related work on Fedora, FreeBSD and openSUSE (strictly in alphabetical order :-) ). However, the vast majority of syslog-ng users actually run syslog-ng on RHEL and compatible operating systems.
So, what is supported in the new repository? RHEL 8, 9 and 10, together with compatible operating systems on x86_64 an Aarch64 (64-bit ARM) architectures.
A note to syslog-ng PE users
Installing the open-source edition of syslog-ng (syslog-ng OSE) might be tempting in some situations. Many features arrive there earlier and it also supports some esoteric platforms. However, unlike syslog-ng PE, there is no commercial-level support available for syslog-ng OSE. Therefore, I recommend contacting your One Identity sales representative if you miss an open-source feature from syslog-ng PE.
Installing syslog-ng
As a prerequisite, 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-stable.repo and save it to the /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory.
You are now ready to install syslog-ng. Run the following command to install it with minimal dependencies:
dnf install syslog-ng
You can list all available syslog-ng sub-packages with the following command:
dnf search syslog-ng
Testing
Use the syslog-ng -V command to check the version number. Version numbers have three digits, indicating the major, minor and bugfix version of the installed release, respectively:
[root@localhost ~]# syslog-ng -V syslog-ng 4 (4.10.0) Config version: 4.2 Installer-Version: 4.10.0 Revision: Compile-Date: Sep 22 2025 00:00:00 [...]
Make sure that syslog-ng is up and running, 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?
Every commit in the syslog-ng code base goes through thousands of test cases, and we do some extra tests before a release. If you still run into any issues, do not hesitate to report them 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.