Setup Logrotate [1/2]

Most Linux systems will come with am installed tool, logrotate, that rotates log files. Unless rotated, log files keep growing until they fill all the free space . Rotating them means copying them to a backup file and creating a new empty log. Backup logs are usually removed when they are to far out of date. Usually logrotate runs without any special configuration by the system administrator. Most of the times it is installed to run nightly as a cron job and each service you install, as a separate package, will also install a custom configuration file that tells logrotate how to rotate the log files for that application.

What most users never realize is that they can make use of logrotate as well. If you have any programs that keep a log then logrotate will save you some time by cleaning up for you. Logrotate can easily be used by normal users and the super user.

In this example I'll show how to set logrotate for Apache webserver logs. By default the custom logrotate configuration files are saved in this directory /etc/logrotate.d/.