Comments on: Rotating Rails Log Files

By: Michael Hale

Michael Hale — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:36:34 +0000

The problem with using copytruncate instead of create is that there is the possibility of loosing log data if your process writes to the original file after the copy, but before the truncate. Using create instead of copy truncate solves this problem, but you have to be able to signal your process (restart works) so that it starts writing to the new log file. Here is logrotate file I’m using for production mongrels: http://gist.github.com/99826

By: Logfiles getting big? Rotate them automatically! « My Pragmatig life

Logfiles getting big? Rotate them automatically! « My Pragmatig life — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:25:05 +0000

[...] if there are more than 3 of them they get deleted. Maximum filesystem usage: 30mb An alternative is using logrotate which is a harder to setup and maintain, but offers more [...]

By: Chad Bearden

Chad Bearden — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:05:35 +0000

Thanks for the article. If you are doing this on a ubuntu or debian based system make sure that logrotate is actually installed. It’s easy to be fooled since apache and mysql install rotate scripts in /etc/logrotate.d

To install:

sudo apt-get install logrotate

add your new config file to: /etc/logrotate.d

test:

sudo logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.c/my_servers_rotate_script

force a rotate:

sudo logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.c/my_servers_rotate_script

By: Ryan Holt

Ryan Holt — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 21:44:52 +0000

Thanks for the great article! I had just come to the point in building an application where I knew I’d need to solve the log file problem. Definitely a helpful article. I really appreciated the thorough explanations of each configuration option.

By: Martin

Martin — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:39:43 +0000

Thanks for the excellent article! I’ve tried (following different advice from various sources) using the method suggested by Matt, but I can’t get it to work. I will definitely try this method. I feel that in most cases that the job of rotating logs is probably not the job of the application or web server. It’s probably debatable as to where this kind of functionality should sit (as is the question of any domain-specific functionality), but it probably comes down to each individual case.

By: Simply Internet Trash » rotate those rails logs

Simply Internet Trash » rotate those rails logs — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:39:42 +0000

[...] established a standard deployment location of /usr/local/sites/sitename for our apps. Following this advice I think I’ll use standard logrotate to move the logs around. I’ve read that log [...]

By: Matt Tarbit

Matt Tarbit — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:04:00 +0000

You can actually do log rotation from within rails by adding the following line to the Rails::Initializer.run block in your app’s /config/environment.rb:

config.logger = Logger.new(config.log_path, 50, 1024**2)

The 2nd argument being the number of .log files you’d like to keep, and the 3rd being the size in bytes that the files are allowed to reach before they’ll be rotated. So this line would keep up to a maximum of 50 1MB files. Not quite as configurable as logrotate perhaps (it doesn’t support compression for example), but it’s nice to be able to keep all of the config within the app.

See here for more:
http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2005/12/15/who-said-size-is-not-important

By: Ian Lotinsky

Ian Lotinsky — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:35:14 +0000

Kevin –

Thanks. I did some more research and discovered that the daily/weekly/monthly option is to specify criteria for backup. So if you have it set to daily and, for some reason, the cron job runs twice, the log(s) will not be rotated.

Of course you can override this behavior with the -f (–force) option.

Thanks for the post!

By: Kevin Skoglund

Kevin Skoglund — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:02:04 +0000

@Ian: It runs as a cron job, so it will run at whatever time your daily, weekly or monthly cron jobs run. AFAIK, you can’t give it a more specific time.

By: Ian Lotinsky

Ian Lotinsky — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 18:52:46 +0000

Thanks for the great post! Question: is there any way to specify what time you want the rotation to run? If not, is there a standard time it backs up at? Thanks!