Logs

pboss captures stdout and stderr of every managed process to files under ~/.pboss/logs/ automatically — you never set up log redirection yourself.

• stdout → ~/.pboss/logs/<name>-<id>-out.log
• stderr → ~/.pboss/logs/<name>-<id>-error.log

pboss logs#

Display recent logs for a process.

pboss logs

pboss logs my-api --lines 100

pboss logs my-api --err

Follow mode — streams new lines as they arrive, like tail -f:

pboss logs my-api --follow
pboss logs my-api -f
pboss logs -f

With no target, pboss logs shows the most recently started process; pboss logs -f follows it.

pboss flush#

Clear log files.

pboss flush my-api
pboss flush

With no target, all managed processes are flushed.

Log rotation#

Rotation runs automatically in the background: pboss checks log file sizes once per minute and rotates when the configured threshold is exceeded.

pboss start server.ts --log-max-size 50M --log-retain 10 --log-compress

Rotation behavior — when a log file exceeds --log-max-size:

1. It is renamed with a numeric suffix.
2. Existing rotated files are shifted up by one number.
3. Files beyond the --log-retain count are deleted.
4. If --log-compress is enabled, rotated files are gzip-compressed with the executing runtime’s native compression — Bun.gzipSync under Bun, node:zlib under Node and Deno.

Defaults#

Custom log paths#

Redirect per process with --output / --error, or configure the same in an ecosystem file via outFile / errorFile:

pboss start server.ts --output /var/log/my-api/out.log --error /var/log/my-api/err.log

--merge-logs writes all instances of a cluster into one file instead of one file per instance, and --log-date-format prefixes every line with a timestamp:

pboss start server.ts --merge-logs --log-date-format "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss"

Container tip#

In Docker, pair --no-daemon with --raw so your logs appear in docker logs and in files. See Foreground mode.