Logrotate For Rails

April 21, 2010 – Philly

Mat and I have been setting up a beta server recently and decided that we should actually rotate our logs. Thankfully, Mat knew enough about logrotate. Since I didn’t know jack about logrotate before yesterday, I figure it’s probably worth explaining to you as well. So without further ado, here’s our logrotate conf for our rails app:

/srv/our_app/current/log/*.log {
  daily          # rotate daily
  rotate 12      # keep twelve copies
  compress       # gzip the old files
  missingok      # don't barf if there is no log
  copytruncate
}

The first line tells logrotate where our logs are. The last line tells logrotate to copy the log file then truncate the existing file in place. This is important because rails isn’t down with flipping the file handle (we think).

On a unixy system, place the above text in a file called our_app in the /etc/logrotate.d directory. Then make it owned by root. Logrotate will now rotate your rails logs each night.

Neat!