Why does rails crash when rotating logs? What is the proper way to rotate logs in rails?

Question

I did not want to go through the headache of setting up 4 node-servers with 3 applications each by using logrotate for UNIX.

So I decided to setup my rails applications with the following inside environment.rb:

  log_path = "#{Rails.root}/log/#{ENV['RAILS_ENV']}.log"
  shift_age = 'weekly' # you can either 1) specify 2 params 50, 1024bytes OR 2) specify 1 param 'daily | weekly | monthly'
  config.logger = Logger.new(log_path, shift_age)

However, this caused the rails application to break once the files were rolled over.

I am wondering, what is the best way to rotate logs with rails applications? Is it logrotate? Thanks.

Answer 1

This happens because one process is trying to rotate the log file at the same time that the another process is trying to rotate it, a race condition occurs, and the server stops responding to requests, as a Fatal Exception is raise