GNet Solutions » FreeBSD Administration

• Table of contents
• Rotating With Logrotate
• Rotating With Rotatelogs
• Resources

This is a simple guide for setting up logrotate and rotatelogs on FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE.

• Update the system and ports tree:
  

  pkg update && pkg upgrade
  portsnap fetch extract
  

Rotating With Logrotate¶

• Install logrotate:
  

  pkg install logrotate
  

• Edit the logrotate config file:
  

  vi /usr/local/etc/logrotate.conf
  

  • Add/modify the following:
    

    /var/log/httpd-access_log {
    daily
    size 1024k
    rotate 30
    copytruncate
    compress
    notifempty
    missingok
    }
    /var/log/httpd-error_log {
    daily
    size 1024k
    rotate 30
    copytruncate
    compress
    notifempty
    missingok
    }
    

• Test logrotate:
  

  logrotate -d /usr/local/etc/logrotate.conf
  

• Setup a cronjob to run logrotate:
  

  crontab -e
  

  • And add the following:
    

    ## Logrotate at 1 AM in the morning
    0 01 * * * root /usr/local/sbin/logrotate /usr/local/etc/logrotate.conf > /dev/null 2>&1
    

• Restart cron:
  

  service cron restart
  

Rotating With Rotatelogs¶

Rotate logs is a tool provided by Apache for use in conjunction with Apache's piped logfile feature. It supports rotation based on a time interval or maximum size of the log.

• This creates the files /var/logs/logfile.nnnn where nnnn is the system time at which the log nominally starts (this time will always be a multiple of the rotation time, so you can synchronize cron scripts with it). At the end of each rotation time (here after 24 hours) a new log is started.
  

  CustomLog "|bin/rotatelogs /var/logs/logfile 86400" common
  

• This creates the files /var/logs/logfile.yyyy.mm.dd where yyyy is the year, mm is the month, and dd is the day of the month. Logging will switch to a new file every day at midnight, local time.
  

  CustomLog "|bin/rotatelogs -l /var/logs/logfile.%Y.%m.%d 86400" common
  

• This configuration will rotate the logfile whenever it reaches a size of 5 megabytes.
  

  CustomLog "|bin/rotatelogs /var/logs/logfile 5M" common
  

• This configuration will rotate the error logfile whenever it reaches a size of 5 megabytes, and the suffix to the logfile name will be created of the form errorlog.YYYY-mm-dd-HH_MM_SS.
  

  ErrorLog "|bin/rotatelogs /var/logs/errorlog.%Y-%m-%d-%H_%M_%S 5M" 
  

Resources¶

• https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=logrotate&manpath=SuSE+Linux/i386+11.3
• https://teklimbu.wordpress.com/2007/10/16/managing-your-linuxunix-log-files-using-logrotate/
• http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/07/logrotate-examples/
• http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/rotatelogs.html