Logrotate doesn't rotate logs

kenneho · 11-04-2008, 08:05 AM

Hi.

I've configured logrotate to rotate two of the Apache log files weekly, but it doesn't seem to be working. This is my configuration:

Code:

/var/log/httpd/access_log /var/log/httpd/ssl_access_log { 
    missingok 
    weekly 
    rotate 156   # Keep logs for 3 years 
    compress 
    sharedscripts 
    postrotate 
        /sbin/service httpd reload > /dev/null 2>/dev/null || true 
    endscript 
}

I did this maybe a couple of week ago. The result is this:

Code:

[root@server httpd]# ll -h ssl_access_log* 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.3M Nov  4 14:53 ssl_access_log 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  22K Oct 17 12:48 ssl_access_log.1

As one can see these has been a lot more than a week since the last rotate. Can anyone see why logrotate doesn't rotate the logs?
And what's the best way to debug these kind of problems?

Regards,
kenneho

gilead · 11-04-2008, 05:02 PM

I can't find the docs I had on why this was happening to me as well, but I ended up using Apache's log rotation commands instead of logrotate for my web logs. I have the following in httpd.conf on one of my boxes:

Code:

CustomLog "|/usr/local/apache2/bin/rotatelogs -l /var/log/httpd/access.log.%Y-%m-%d 2419200"

kenneho · 11-05-2008, 02:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gilead

I can't find the docs I had on why this was happening to me as well, but I ended up using Apache's log rotation commands instead of logrotate for my web logs. I have the following in httpd.conf on one of my boxes:

Code:

CustomLog "|/usr/local/apache2/bin/rotatelogs -l /var/log/httpd/access.log.%Y-%m-%d 2419200"

I didn't know Apache came with it's own logrotate implementation. Nice feature. It's bugging me, though, that linux logrotate doesn't work, so if anyone knows what may be causing this I'd greatly appreciate a hint.

Anyways, I found Apache's logrotate script under /usr/sbin/rotatelogs, and this is the information I got from the script:

Code:

[root@server ~]# /usr/sbin/rotatelogs -h 
Usage: /usr/sbin/rotatelogs [-l] <logfile> <rotation time in seconds> [offset minutes from UTC] or <rotation size in megabytes>

Add this: 

TransferLog "|/usr/sbin/rotatelogs /some/where 86400" 

or 

TransferLog "|/usr/sbin/rotatelogs /some/where 5M" 

to httpd.conf. The generated name will be /some/where.nnnn where nnnn is the 
system time at which the log nominally starts (N.B. if using a rotation time, 
the time will always be a multiple of the rotation time, so you can synchronize 
cron scripts with it). At the end of each rotation time or when the file size 
is reached a new log is started.

I doesn't seem like there is any kind of file size compression going on. Is the only solution writing a cron job myself to handle this?

kenneho · 11-06-2008, 03:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kenneho

Code:

/var/log/httpd/access_log /var/log/httpd/ssl_access_log { 
    missingok 
    weekly 
    rotate 156   # Keep logs for 3 years 
    compress 
    sharedscripts 
    postrotate 
        /sbin/service httpd reload > /dev/null 2>/dev/null || true 
    endscript 
}

This is quite embarrasing, but I suspect that the reason why the above code didn't work was because of the comment (i.e. "# Keep logs for 3 years"). I found this in the man page:

Code:

Note that comments may appear anywhere in the config file as long as the first non-whitespace character on the line is a #.

I have to wait a while to verifiy that I got logrotate working, but it seems very promising.

vap16oct1984 · 06-22-2009, 04:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kenneho

This is quite embarrasing, but I suspect that the reason why the above code didn't work was because of the comment (i.e. "# Keep logs for 3 years"). I found this in the man page:

Code:

Note that comments may appear anywhere in the config file as long as the first non-whitespace character on the line is a #.

I have to wait a while to verifiy that I got logrotate working, but it seems very promising.

hey i linux u can easily rotate logs..

pls use this it will work

"/var/log/httpd/access.log" /var/log/httpd/error.log {
rotate 5
mail www@my.org
size=100k
sharedscripts
postrotate
/sbin/killall -HUP httpd
endscript
}

nanda_martins · 03-23-2010, 12:13 PM

lol wron topic [edited]