Last week my colleague Victor from Paack and I were digging through the server to look at the logs.

-rw-rw-r-- 1 dev      dev     3.5M Nov  25 17:33 newrelic_agent.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data root 1G Nov  25 17:55 nginx.access.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data root 1G Nov  25 17:55 nginx.error.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dev      dev     0 Apr 30  2015 production.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dev      dev     1G Nov  25 17:33 puma.access.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dev      dev  10G Nov 25 12:03 puma.error.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dev      dev     0 Dec  2 17:34 puma.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dev      dev   50M Dec  2 17:52 sidekiq.log

When we looked at this folder we were shocked.Our log files were a couple of Gigabytes,That was a huge problem, since this could result in slower requests as it logs it.

Are some googling we found that logrotate came part of ubuntu.So though of using it.

The configuration was pretty simple, Logrotate configuration is really cool.It loooks like a bunch of dsls.

/home/dev/apps/paack/shared/log/*.log{
  weekly
  size 500M
  rotate 30
  missingok
  compress
  copytruncate
}

Weekly

Runs the script weekly

size

Maximum size of the log file

rotate

Create a maximum of 30 files.

missingok

Ignore error if the file is missng

**compress

**Compress the old logs with gzip

copytruncate

Truncate the old log file and create a new one file with the truncated data.

More information can be found on the documentation website