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Logrotate

Logrotate is a tool admins use to manage system logs on their Linux servers.

Config files are kept in /etc/logrotate.d/, to add a new file you would want to do the following, changing config_file to a proper name:

touch /etc/logrotate.d/config_file

chmod 644 /etc/logrotate.d/config_file

chown root.root /etc/logrotate.d/config_file

Then edit the file with your required settings.

To ensure your config changes are free of errors, you can run this command:

logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.d/config_file

Some things you can do with logrotate are:

  • rotate our logs daily, weekly, monthly
  • rotate your logs based on file size
  • compress log files after rotation
  • remove old rotated logs

Logrotate Configuration files

  • /usr/sbin/logrotate – The logrotate command itself.
  • /etc/cron.daily/logrotate – This shell script executes the logrotate command everyday.
  • /etc/logrotate.conf – Log rotation configuration for all the log files are specified in this file.
  • /etc/logrotate.d – When individual packages are installed on the system, they drop the log rotation configuration information in this directory.