# Logrotate

Related articles

- Cron
- systemd/Timers

From https://github.com/logrotate/logrotate:

  The logrotate utility is designed to simplify the administration of log files on a system which generates a lot of log files. Logrotate allows for the automatic rotation compression, removal and mailing of log files. Logrotate can be set to handle a log file daily, weekly, monthly or when the log file gets to a certain size.

By default, logrotate's rotation consists of renaming existing log files with a numerical suffix, then recreating the original empty log file. For example, `/var/log/syslog.log` is renamed `/var/log/syslog.log.1`. If `/var/log/syslog.log.1` already exists from a previous rotation, it is first renamed `/var/log/syslog.log.2`. (The number of backlogs to keep can be configured.)

## Installation

Logrotate can be installed with the logrotate package. It is installed by default as it is member of the base group.

By default, logrotate runs daily using a systemd timer: `logrotate.timer`.

## Configuration

The primary configuration file for logrotate is `/etc/logrotate.conf`; additional configuration files are included from the `/etc/logrotate.d` directory.

## Troubleshooting

### exim log not rotated

If you have set the `olddir` variable in `/etc/logrotate.conf`, you will get a message such as:

`error: failed to rename /var/log/exim/mainlog to /var/log/old/mainlog.1: Permission denied`

To fix this, add the user `exim` to the group `log`. Then change the group of the `olddir`, usually `/var/log/old`, to `log` instead of the default `root`.

### Check logrotate status

Run `cat /var/lib/logrotate.status` to see which logrotate files were rotated.

    "/var/log/mysql/query.log" 2016-3-20-5:0:0
    "/var/log/samba/samba-smbd.log" 2016-3-21-5:0:0
    "/var/log/httpd/access_log" 2016-3-20-5:0:0

## See also

- Logrotate on Gentoo Linux Wiki
- logrotate(8) Manual page

Categories:

- Daemons and system services
- Data compression and archiving