Logrotate
Related articles
From https://fedorahosted.org/logrotate/:
- The logrotate utility is designed to simplify the administration of log files on a system which generates a lot of log files. Logrotate allows for the automatic rotation compression, removal and mailing of log files. Logrotate can be set to handle a log file daily, weekly, monthly or when the log file gets to a certain size.
By default, logrotate's rotation consists of renaming existing log files with a numerical suffix, then recreating the original empty log file. For example, /var/log/syslog.log
is renamed /var/log/syslog.log.1
. If /var/log/syslog.log.1
already exists from a previous rotation, it is first renamed /var/log/syslog.log.2
. (The number of backlogs to keep can be configured.)
Contents
Installation
logrotate is available in the official repositories and is installed by default as a member of the base group.
logrotate no longer uses a daily cron job. Instead, it uses a systemd timer: systemctl status logrotate.timer
Configuration
The primary configuration file for logrotate is /etc/logrotate.conf
; additional configuration files are included from the /etc/logrotate.d
directory.
Troubleshooting
logs not being rotated
If you find that your logs aren't being rotated via the cronjob, one reason for that can be wrong user
and group
ownership. Both need to be root
. To fix this either do:
# chown root:root /etc/logrotate.conf # chown -R root:root /etc/logrotate.d
or, set the su
variable to the user and group you desire in /etc/logrotate.conf
.
exim log not rotated
If you have set the olddir
variable in /etc/logrotate.conf
, you will get a message such as:
error: failed to rename /var/log/exim/mainlog to /var/log/old/mainlog.1: Permission denied
To fix this, add the user exim
to the group log
. Then change the group of the olddir
, usually /var/log/old
, to log
instead of the default root
.