logrotate: delete tomcat/jboss logs older than n days
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21-12-2019 - |
Question
I haven't found a solution to purge old tomcat or jboss logs or any other timestamped logs: catalog.log./server.log.. Basically these logs are rotated by jboss as: server.log, server.log.20131201, server.log.20131203 and so on.
Is there a way I can use logrotate to delete logs older than n days? I don't want to use find inside postrotate or tweak jboss/tomcat logging properties. I just want to know if logrotate can actually achieve this on it's own. I know it's not very productive but I am stuck with a problem where I need answer for this.
Solution
If you don't want to use find
inside postrotate
, no, you can't.
logrotate
treats every instance of server.log
rotated by Tomcat/JBoss as a different file, and since they are unique, logrotate
will rotate them only once. maxage
- the directive that removes rotated logs older than n
days - is only checked if the logfile is to be rotated, so that maxage
is only executed once and can't keep track of the file's age.
However, if you change your mind about using find
, logrotate
can help you simplify the management of log files created by Tomcat and JBoss. I use it to compress and remove old files with a configuration file like this:
/path/to/logs/server.log.????-??-?? {
compress
compresscmd /usr/bin/bzip2
nocreate
nodateext
ifempty
missingok
rotate 1
size 0
start 0
lastaction
# Remove rotated files older than 180 days
find /path/to/logs -name 'server.log.????-??-??.0.bz2' -mtime +180 -exec rm {} \;
endscript
}
where:
rotate 1
andcompress
rename and compress, say,server.log.20131201
toserver.log.20131201.0.bz2
. The0
between the timestamp and the.bz2
extension comes fromstart 0
.size 0
makes sure that files are always renamed and compressed.- The
lastaction
block removes rotated files older than 180 days.
OTHER TIPS
logrotate can manage your logs rotating them and eventually keeping a limited number of rotated logs. But AFAIK it can do it only for logs it manages directly. If your logs are already rotated by some other agent (i.e. Tomcat itself), logrotate can't do anything, simply because does not know anything about the rotation performed by something else.
So the answer is no, you can't use logrotate to delete logs not managed by itself (and I think is not even intended to do something like that).
You can put script to /etc/cron.daily. For example:
cat /etc/cron.daily/tomcat-rotate-logs
#!/bin/sh
# erasing tomcat logs older then 7 days
for x in $(find /var/log/tomcat/ -type f -mtime +7);
do
rm "$x";
logger -t TOMCAT-ROTATE-LOGS "Erasing $x [done]";
done
or create a logrotate config. For example: cat /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat
/var/log/tomcat/*.log {
su tomcat tomcat
copytruncate
daily
rotate 6
compress
missingok
}
"su tomcat tomcat" - stands for avoiding logrotate error on wrong permissions