Thursday, August 28, 2014

Log file rotate

Just to remind myself , that the linux logrotate daemon is very handy for those occasions when applications simply output to a single file that keeps growing over time.

THis will rotate daily (and add a date ext to the old file), after 31 days it will start to delete old files. It will not compres them (remove this line if you want it to compress the old log files). Not the size attribute is no longer been specified as it overrides the daily directive, and only rotates if files grow greater than10M. (Apparently there is a maxSize directive in newer versions of logrotate, that can be combined).. See http://serverfault.com/questions/391538/logrotate-daily-and-size

This job gets run nightly. If you want to run it immediately (e.g. to rotate a large file)  then,

>sudo /usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf

e.g. > sudo vi /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat
/dirto/catalina.out /dirto/tomcat.log /dirto/admin.log /dirto/stacktrace.log{
  copytruncate
  daily
  rotate 31
  nocompress
  dateext
  missingok
  size 10M
}