Logrotate cheat-sheet

It’s probably installed by default but if not most distribution’s package managers refer to it as logrotate so installing it is pretty straight forward

apt install logrotate
dnf install logrotate
pacman -S logrotate

The main configuration file is:

/etc/logrotate.conf

With (by default) additional configuration files being loaded from the directory:

/etc/logrotate.d

Command to debug configuration file

logrotate -d "{:PathToConfigFile:}"

Command to force run configuration file in verbose mode

logrotate -vf "{:PathToConfigFile:}"

The following is an example configuration for rotating one log file:

/var/log/{:AppName:}.log {
  missingok
  compress
  notifempty
  copytruncate
}

The following is an example configuration for rotating logs file using a wildcard:

/var/log/{:AppName:}/* {
  rotate 30
  daily
  missingok
  olddir "/var/log/{:AppName:}/archive"
  dateext
  compress
}

Common configuration options

Option	Description
rotate {:NumberToKeep:}	Keep {:NumberToKeep:} amount of rotated logs
daily / weekly / monthly	Rotate logs regularly
size {:Size:}	Rotate logs when they hit {:Size:} in bytes. Can be set as (kilo/mega/giga)bytes with k/M/G
missingok	Do not error if log file doesn’t exist
olddir “{:DirectoryPath:}”	Places rotated logs into {:DirectoryPath:}
dateext	Use date extension in YYYYMMDD format (e.g: 20380120) instead of number format
notifempty	Do not rotate if log is empty
compress /nocompress	Compress or not do compress rotated log files
delaycompress	When using compress will delay compression of the log being rotated until the following rotation
copytruncate	Do not delete existing log file, copy file for rotation and truncate contents of existing file
create {:Mode:} {:Owner:} {:Group:}	Specify the permissions octal, owner and group when creating a new log file
createolddir {:Mode:} {:Owner:} {:Group:}	Create the old directory if it does not exist and set the permissions octal, owner and group to those specified