How do you prevent a log file from getting too big with logrotate?

#linux #ubuntu #bash

Recently a log file on one of my droplets got too big and filled up the disk space of the server, so I decided to share my solution here!

There were two things that I had to do:

As the log was really big and was exhausting the available webspace I had to truncate the log. I did this with the following command:

> /var/log/my.log

That way the log is truncated without disrupting the processes.

For a more structural solution, it is best to use logrotate. So what I did was to add a new conf file in the /etc/logrotate.d/ directory. The content of the file looked something like this:

/var/log/my.log {
       weekly      
       rotate 4    
       compress    
}

A quick rundown of the options:

rotate 4 : keep four old log files.
weekly : rotate once a week.
compress : compress the rotated files, by default gzip is used and results in files ending in .gz.

For more information I would recommend checking the logrotate man page and this tutorial on DigitalOcean.

Hope that this helps!