Learning DevOps: Continuously Deliver Better Software

Managing log rotation with the Logrotate utility

It's often surprising how much space can be consumed by something as simple as a plain text file, and without constant care and attention logs can grow to fill the available free space on a host. Fortunately, given their nature as plain text, they are compressible. Indeed, you can expect compression ratios of 80% or more on most log files.

The Logrotate utility is shipped with most Linux distributions and offers a simple yet powerful method to manage logs, allowing you to rotate, compress, and remove on the schedules you set. It also has the ability to run scripts both pre- and post-rotation, thus allowing you to send signals to applications to gracefully restart or to send logs to a remote location ...