Rotating Rails Production Logs with LogRotate Discussion

Would it be good to backup the compressed log files off production server? Can we use backup gem for just that?

To handle random spurts of excessive log generation tuck in 'maxsize [size]' option too. Maxsize ensure logrotation both weekly/daily etc. and also out of turn if the logfiles increase beyond a specified [size].

Hello Chris, Is there any way we can rename the file concatenating the date it rotates rather then "1".

Just want to share, If you want older files in a seperate directory then you may use "olddir" parameter in it; like :

/var/log/news/* {
monthly
rotate 2
olddir /var/log/news/old
missingok
compress
}

I have been thinking of implementing this since long back - finally implemented after reading this article.
Thanks for summing up this very well.

Add `this takes barely 5 minutes to read and complete` ;-). Concise badge. Also, your article should have a date on them (both created and updated); provides added insights as to potential gotchas from framework changes over time.

Thank you so much for this post! :)

can i set the time for hourly backup manually ??
like at every hour's past 15 minutes ??

why not create a application specific log file and place it in the /etc/logrotate.d folder?

Thanks for the great guide.

Just in case anyone else gets this error:

error: skipping "$RAILS_DIR/log/development.log" because parent directory has insecure permissions (It's world writable or writable by group which is not "root") Set "su" directive in config file to tell logrotate which user/group should be used for rotation.

I was able to fix it by instructing the logrotate to run as the same user as my rails app (in my case deploy) instead of running as root:

$RAILS_DIR/log/*.log {
su deploy deploy
daily
missingok
rotate 7
compress
delaycompress
notifempty
copytruncate
}

Does one need to take any special care about race conditions between log rotation and the logger writing to the file being rotated?

1. Already configed and run sudo /usr/sbin/logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf.
2. ls to log folder and see: development.log development.log.1 production.log production.log.1 Why can't I see the compressed log (production.log.1.gz)? Below are the configuration with log rotate: /home/ubuntu/project_name/log/*.log { daily missingok rotate 30 compress delaycompress notifempty copytruncate }

Thanks beforehand for your response.