logrotate is used by the system to rotate logs so you have 2 choices. You can either incorporate the rotation of these app logs into the systems rotations or setup your own and either run them manually or from the root user's crontab (Assuming the Rails app is run as root given it's directory is /root/...).
System rotation
To setup a logrotation within the system's pre-existing ones simply add a new file to the directory /etc/logrotate.d. Call it railsapp.conf. I'd use the other examples there to construct it. Also confrere with the logrotate man page.
User rotation
If you want to run your own instance of logrotate you only have to provide it with command line switches to do so.
- First make a copy of
/etc/logrotate.conf /root/rails_logrotate.conf
- Edit the file so that it has the log rotation configured the way you want (i.e. keep all logs, rotate weekly, etc.)
Run it
# 1st time
$ logrotate -d -f -s $HOME/my_logrotate.state logrotate.conf
# afterwards
$ logrotate -d -s $HOME/my_logrotate.state logrotate.conf
If things look OK you can re-run these commands without the -d switch. This is for debugging purposes only and won't actually do any of the tasks, merely show you what it WOULD do.
$ logrotate -s $HOME/my_logrotate.state logrotate.conf
You could also use the -v switch to make it verbose, similar to the output seen when using the -d switch.
Example
Start with this log file.
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=afile bs=1k count=10k
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
10485760 bytes (10 MB) copied, 0.0702393 s, 149 MB/s
$ ll afile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 saml saml 10485760 Aug 6 14:37 afile
$ touch -t 201307010101 afile
$ ll afile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 saml saml 10485760 Jul 1 01:01 afile
Now run logrotate
$ logrotate -v -f -s $HOME/my_logrotate.state logrotate.conf
reading config file logrotate.conf
reading config info for /home/saml/afile
Handling 1 logs
rotating pattern: /home/saml/afile forced from command line (1 rotations)
empty log files are rotated, old logs are removed
considering log /home/saml/afile
log needs rotating
rotating log /home/saml/afile, log->rotateCount is 1
dateext suffix '-20130806'
glob pattern '-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]'
glob finding old rotated logs failed
renaming /home/saml/afile to /home/saml/afile-20130806
creating new /home/saml/afile mode = 0664 uid = 500 gid = 501
Check the results
$ ll afile*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 saml saml 0 Aug 6 14:40 afile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 saml saml 10485760 Jul 1 01:01 afile-20130806
Weekly Cron
To make this run every Sunday you could create the following crontab entry for the root user.
$ crontab -e
Add the following lines:
# Example of job definition:
# .---------------- minute (0 - 59)
# | .------------- hour (0 - 23)
# | | .---------- day of month (1 - 31)
# | | | .------- month (1 - 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr ...
# | | | | .---- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0 or 7) OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
# | | | | |
# * * * * * user-name command to be executed
0 0 * * sun logrotate -v -f -s $HOME/my_logrotate.state $HOME/logrotate.conf
Then save the above.
You can also use these types of shortcuts instead of specifying the actual days, mins, secs, etc.
string meaning
------ -------
@reboot Run once, at startup.
@yearly Run once a year, "0 0 1 1 *".
@annually (same as @yearly)
@monthly Run once a month, "0 0 1 * *".
@weekly Run once a week, "0 0 * * 0".
@daily Run once a day, "0 0 * * *".
@midnight (same as @daily)
@hourly Run once an hour, "0 * * * *".
References
Best Answer
The reason that apache needs a reload is that once it's opened a file, it gets a filehandle to it, and it will keep writing to that filehandle. When you move the file, it doesn't see that, it just keeps writing to the same handle. When you do a reload, it'll open the file again and get a new handle.
To avoid the reload, instead of moving the file, you can copy it and empty the old file. That way apache can keep writing to the same filehandle. You do this by adding the option "copytruncate" to the logrotate config file, like this: