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Accepted
orokusaki
Asked: 2011-02-01 17:06:24 +0800 CST

How can I keep my web server's log files from becoming too large?

  • 772

Note: I am using Apache2 (on Linux), but I asked in a general sense (for Linux only) because I'd also like to know the "best" way to do accomplish this in a general (since I'm about to deploy a large site on Nginx, or Cherokee).

My log files are becoming huge after just a few weeks. I need to keep them around temporarily, but I'd like to delete entries that are older than 2 weeks, or so. Is this possible, and how do I do it?

logging apache-2.2 log-files web-server nginx

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You could use logrotate. It rotates logs according to a configuration file for a specific service. It is usually run by cron on a daily basis.

    An example of a config file for apache at /etc/logrotate.d/apache2

    /var/log/apache2/*_log {
 daily
 rotate 31
 missingok
 compress
 delaycompress
 sharedscripts
 postrotate
  if [ -f "`. /etc/apache2/envvars ; echo ${APACHE_PID_FILE:-/var/run/apache2.pid}`" ]; then
     /etc/init.d/apache2 reload > /dev/null
  fi
 endscript
 }

    This would:

    • rotate logs everyday
    • keep 31 rotated log files
    • Compress rotated logs but keep latest rotated one uncompressed (delaycompress)
    • Reload the process

    If you dont want the process to be reloaded, then you should use copytruncate, which will copy the current content onto a new file, compress it and then truncate current logfile. In this case you dont need sharedscripts, postrotate and endscript.

    • 8

  2. The canonical tool for handling logs is logrotate.

    • 2