The logrotate is a tool to manage log in linux.This tool will separate and drop the log file periodically(typical daily).And it’s simple to use as below:

Installation

Need logrotate and cronie. Maybe can install by sudo pacman -Sy logrotate cronie if you use archlinux. Or other way depend on your distribution.

logrotate

The configuration entry about logrotate is /etc/logrotate.conf. But we don’t change itself in fact. This configuration file will include all file in /etc/logrotate.d/, so we just add our log configuration into here.

The format about logrotate as below:

/var/log/log-file {  # the log file
    monthly  # Separate period
    rotate 5  # Limit 5 archive log file
    compress  # Compress archived log file by gzip
    delaycompress  # Don't compress latest log file
    missingok  # Ignore the error
    notifempty  # Don't work if log is empty
    create 644 root root  # Log files permission
    postrotate
        /usr/bin/killall -HUP rsyslogd  # Will executed finally
    endscript  # Will executed finally
}

We can know logrotate will separate and archive log file periodically.And you can do some thing by script by the way.

Cronie

In fact, logrotate will not run itself, it’s powered by cronie that the useful tool to run job periodically in linux.

The format of playbook in cronie as below:

# minute hour   day    month  week  script
# [0-60] [0-24] [1-31] [1-12] [0-7] executable
* 0 * * * /bin/hello  # Means execute /bin/hello in 0 AM every day

In fact, you can put the script in some directory such as /etc/cron.daily if you don’t need so time-accurate job.

note:You need to check cronie deamon process after complete the job, if it don’t running or enabled, you need to enable and run it by systemctl enable crond && systemctl start crond maybe.

Cron job for logrotate

Now we can write a cron job for logrotate.In fact, we can just write a script as below:

#!/bin/sh
    
# Clean non existent log file entries from status file
cd /var/lib/logrotate
test -e status || touch status
head -1 status > status.clean
sed 's/"//g' status | while read logfile date
do
    [ -e "$logfile" ] && echo "\"$logfile\" $date"
done >> status.clean
mv status.clean status
    
test -x /usr/sbin/logrotate || exit 0
/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf

The we can put this into /etc/cron.daily or others, but notice that the period of cron job must equal or less than logrotate period.The cron job will execute logrotate periodically and logroate will check time of log file and decide if to separate and archive it.