FiveM server logs: where they are and how to keep them

Short answer: FXServer writes no log file by default — the console is the log. If you run txAdmin you get three rotating files in txData/<profile>/logs/: admin.log, fxserver.log and server.log. Without txAdmin, you capture the console yourself by redirecting stdout.

What FXServer writes on its own

Nothing persistent. Cfx.re staff put it plainly on the official forum: "There's no log file, errors are logged into the server console." That single sentence resolves most of what circulates about this topic, including several things you will find on page one of a search:

• There is no sv_logFile convar. It appears in hosting knowledge bases and from there in articles; it is not in the FiveM documentation.
• There is no /opt/fivem/logs/ tree, and no logs folder in your server root. A page ranking for this exact query publishes a directory listing that does not exist.
• netevents_logToFile does not work. It came from a pull request that was closed without being merged in August 2021.

The three files txAdmin adds

txAdmin introduced persistent logging with rotation in v4.6.0. The files live in txData/<profile>/logs/, and the profile is called default unless you changed it:

• admin.log — administrative actions plus automated ones: restarts, bans, warns, settings changes, live console input.
• fxserver.log — the console output, captured to disk. Daily rotation, 7 files.
• server.log — in-game events: joins, disconnects, chat, deaths, commands, explosions. Daily rotation, 7 files.

We cover their format, retention and the panel's limits in txAdmin logs and events. The single most useful trick is worth repeating here: player sources are written as [mutex#id] name, so searching the file for a mutex#id lands you on that player's join line with all their identifiers, and from there you have their whole session.

Running without txAdmin

Redirect the console yourself. On Linux, piping FXServer through tee keeps the output on screen and writes it to a file at the same time; pair it with logrotate so it does not grow without limit. On Windows, redirect the output of the batch file that starts the server. It is cruder than what txAdmin gives you, but it is the difference between having something to read after an incident and having nothing.

What frameworks add on top

ESX, QBCore and Qbox ship their own logging, and it is almost always Discord webhooks rather than files: purchases, transfers, deaths, admin commands, each pushed to a channel as it happens. That is a different layer from the two above — it records what your scripts decided was worth recording, not what the server observed. In practice most servers end up with all three: the framework's webhooks for gameplay, txAdmin's files for the server, and the console for whatever crashed.

How long you actually keep them

Less than people assume. With defaults, fxserver.log and server.log keep 7 rotated files on a daily interval, so roughly a week. If someone reports an incident from three weeks ago, the log that would have settled it is gone. You can change this by adding a logger block to txData/<profile>/config.json, which takes the options of the underlying rotating-file library — worth doing before you need it rather than after.

What logs cannot tell you

They record what the server could observe. A player joined, typed, died, ran a command. They cannot tell you what that player was seeing, which is the exact gap when the report is "this person is cheating" rather than "this person broke a rule". No amount of log retention closes it.

Being explicit about scope, because this page will rank next to products that do the opposite: FiveMonitor is not a logging tool. It does not collect, store, index, search or forward server logs, and it is not an anticheat. What it does is the other half — watching a player's screen live from the browser and reading the playtime txAdmin already keeps — so your staff can look at the thing the logs could never show. If you need log storage and search, use a tool built for that. Plans from 9.99 EUR/month, 7-day trial, no card: see the features or start the trial.