Log rotation in nginx

I've found an example of doing log rotation in Nginx here

But a simple test with:

    set $date "2018-08-24";
    access_log /home/tim/log/access-http-$date.log default;

produces a log file named access-http-.log. I'm using nginx 1.13.6 (with openresty).

Update

After much hacking & tweaking, I've come up with the following logrotate script to rotate the different log files that nginx produces. I've put it into /etc/logrotate. The remaining issue is that the logs don't rotate daily (I'm unsure why at present), but a logrotate -f <filename> produces exactly the result I want.

An interesting note is that nginx -s reload can be used instead of USR1. That's unfortunately not referenced in the nginx logging page but I found it (in the man page IIRC). I build openresty/nginx manually to incorporate extra modules I need so I don't get various extras that come in the packaged version like the pid keeping.

/path/to/log/access-http.log /path/to/log/access-https.log /path/to/log/api.log /path/to/log/error.log {
    daily
    missingok
    notifempty
    create 664 nobody tim
    dateext
    dateformat -%Y-%m-%d
    dateyesterday
    rotate 10
    su tim tim
    postrotate
        /usr/local/bin/openresty -s reload
    endscript
}

I figure this will be useful for anyone with a large nginx config serving both web pages and an API. I keep the http separate as I don't serve non-https pages and it keeps the script kiddie crap out of my page logs.