Log Rotation

[sukishan]

Log Rotation
Finally, we want to address log rotation. High traffic sites will generate very large log files, which will quickly swallow up valuable disk space on your server. You can use log rotation to manage this process.

There are many ways to handle log rotation, and various third-party tools are available as well. However, we're focusing on configurations native to Apache, so we will look at a simple log rotation scheme here. I'll include links to more flexible and sophisticated log rotation options in a moment.

This example uses a rudimentary shell script to move the current Web log to an archive log, compresses the old file and keeps an archive for as long as 12 months, then restarts Apache with a pause to allow the log files to be switched out.

mv web11.tgz web12.tgz
mv web10.tgz web11.tgz
mv web9.tgz  web10.tgz
mv web8.tgz  web9.tgz
mv web7.tgz  web8.tgz
mv web6.tgz  web7.tgz
mv web5.tgz  web6.tgz
mv web4.tgz  web5.tgz
mv web3.tgz  web4.tgz
mv web2.tgz  web3.tgz
mv web1.tgz  web2.tgz
mv web.tgz   web1.tgz
mv web.log   web.old
/usr/sbin/apachectl graceful
sleep 300
tar cvfz web.tgz web.old

This code can be copied into a file called logrotate.sh, and placed inside the folder where your web.log file is stored (or whatever you name your log file, e.g. access_log, etc.). Just be sure to modify for your log file names and also chmod (change permissions on the file) to 755 so it becomes an executable.

This works fine for a single busy site. If you have more complex requirements for log rotation, be sure to see some of the following sites. In addition, many Linux distributions now come with a log rotation included. For example, Red Hat 9 comes with logrotate.d, a log rotation daemon which is highly configurable. To find out more, on your Linux system with logrotate.d installed, type man logrotate.