Hello,

I am having a problem making my apache logs rotate at the specified time. I want them to rotate on the first of each month and to keep 6 months of logs. However, they seem to be rotating in a somewhat random fashion, for instance, July 19, June 14, May 26, April 7, March 15.

I have an 'httpd' entry in the /etc/logrotate.d directory. It looks like this:

/usr/local/apache2/logs/*log {
monthly
missingok
rotate 6
notifempty
create 640 root root
sharedscripts
postrotate
/usr/bin/killall -HUP httpd
endscript
}

Logrotate is in the /etc/cron.monthly directory.

My cron log for Aug 1 shows that cron.monthly ran successfully.

Can someone help me figure out what is going on? Thanks.

If you are running an apache2 server, you should have a file like

/etc/logrotate.d/apache2

If not, it may be a bug in logrotate..

Your problem description sounds like logrorate is rotating files at some default file size, regardless of your preference for monthly rotation.

Try decompressing a few of the files rotated at odd times. Are they all approximately the same size? If so, that is the default (I've not been able to find anything via google regarding such a default).

Then add a line to your logrotate config file: size=XXXk, or XXXm (where XXX is the file size to rotate). If the file rotates at mid month, double the value of the size= parameter which will hopefully rotate the file at month end. Of course, you must realize that the file will not necessarily always grow at the same rate, so there will be some variation on the rotation period.

An optional configuration would be to set the file size much larger than you expect it to be at month end, and use the -f option of logrotate to force log rotation at month end.

Thanks for your reply. The files are not being compressed. Here are file sizes of the log files. It doesn't appear to be rotating based on a specific size.

640260 access_log.3
497184 access_log.6
471304 access_log.1
355600 access_log.5
317008 access_log
304196 access_log.4
232016 access_log.2

One difference I can see from my setup, is the first line in the file:

/usr/local/apache2/logs/*log {

On my server, it is:

/var/log/apache2/*.log {

(note the dot after the * wildcard)

It should not be significant, the shell should resolve the correct filename, but it would not be the first time such a thing is making a difference..

Just a thought..