Serilog: How to write the file header only at the beginning of the file?

Question

I need to write some information related to the status of the application that is launched via system scheduler. Then the processing lines should follow:

2019-10-09 23:39:22.936 +02:00 [DBG] ======================================================================
2019-10-09 23:39:22.999 +02:00 [DBG] MyAppDELFOR (0.10.1  2019-10-09)
2019-10-09 23:39:22.999 +02:00 [DBG] ----------------------------------------------------------------------
2019-10-09 23:39:23.015 +02:00 [DBG] stageDirectory: 'c:\EDIAbc\Company_received_stage'
2019-10-09 23:39:23.015 +02:00 [DBG] oftpIncomingDirectory: 'c:\EDIAbc\Company_incoming'
2019-10-09 23:39:23.015 +02:00 [DBG] archiveDirectory: 'c:\EDIAbc\Company_received_archive'
2019-10-09 23:39:23.015 +02:00 [DBG] ----------------------------------------------------------------------
2019-10-09 23:39:23.061 +02:00 [WRN] The stage file 'c:\EDIAbc\Company_received_stage\DELFOR_010091_20191001' already exists and is to be deleted.
2019-10-09 23:39:24.905 +02:00 [INF] Processing 'c:\EDIAbc\Company_received_stage\DELFOR_010086_20191001'
2019-10-09 23:39:30.281 +02:00 [INF] Processing 'c:\EDIAbc\Company_received_stage\DELFOR_010087_20191001'
2019-10-09 23:39:34.109 +02:00 [INF] Processing 'c:\EDIAbc\Company_received_stage\DELFOR_010088_20191001'

Currently, I always write the header. However, the application is launched rather frequently, and the case when "No data to process" is rather usual. Because of that I would like to avoid writing the header, and I would like to write just "No data to process" or the like line.

Is there any way (in Serilog) to write the header only when the log file is created?

Answer 1

A set of hooks that enable such a facility have been added to the File sink recently. The main contributor has a nice demo repo.