logrotate: delete tomcat/jboss logs older than n days

Question

I haven't found a solution to purge old tomcat or jboss logs or any other timestamped logs: catalog.log./server.log.. Basically these logs are rotated by jboss as: server.log, server.log.20131201, server.log.20131203 and so on.

Is there a way I can use logrotate to delete logs older than n days? I don't want to use find inside postrotate or tweak jboss/tomcat logging properties. I just want to know if logrotate can actually achieve this on it's own. I know it's not very productive but I am stuck with a problem where I need answer for this.

Answer 1

If you don't want to use find inside postrotate, no, you can't.

logrotate treats every instance of server.log rotated by Tomcat/JBoss as a different file, and since they are unique, logrotate will rotate them only once. maxage - the directive that removes rotated logs older than n days - is only checked if the logfile is to be rotated, so that maxage is only executed once and can't keep track of the file's age.

However, if you change your mind about using find, logrotate can help you simplify the management of log files created by Tomcat and JBoss. I use it to compress and remove old files with a configuration file like this:

/path/to/logs/server.log.????-??-?? {
    compress
    compresscmd /usr/bin/bzip2
    nocreate
    nodateext
    ifempty
    missingok
    rotate 1
    size 0
    start 0
    lastaction
        # Remove rotated files older than 180 days
        find /path/to/logs -name 'server.log.????-??-??.0.bz2' -mtime +180 -exec rm {} \;
    endscript
}

where:

• rotate 1 and compress rename and compress, say, server.log.20131201 to server.log.20131201.0.bz2. The 0 between the timestamp and the .bz2 extension comes from start 0.
• size 0 makes sure that files are always renamed and compressed.
• The lastaction block removes rotated files older than 180 days.

Answer 2

logrotate can manage your logs rotating them and eventually keeping a limited number of rotated logs. But AFAIK it can do it only for logs it manages directly. If your logs are already rotated by some other agent (i.e. Tomcat itself), logrotate can't do anything, simply because does not know anything about the rotation performed by something else.

So the answer is no, you can't use logrotate to delete logs not managed by itself (and I think is not even intended to do something like that).

Answer 3

Not sure if @jaume 's configuration will behave correctly with log file that is writing right now. Especially with "nocreate" option. Would like to see his comment on this point. As for me it would be easier to refuse logrotate and use just bash script in cron. Something like this:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/find /path/to/logs/ -name 'server.log.????-??-??.gz' -mtime +7 -delete
/usr/bin/find /path/to/logs/ -name 'server.log.????-??-??' -mtime +1 -exec gzip -q {} \;

Answer 4

You can put script to /etc/cron.daily. For example:

cat /etc/cron.daily/tomcat-rotate-logs

#!/bin/sh

# erasing tomcat logs older then 7 days

for x in $(find /var/log/tomcat/ -type f -mtime +7);
do
       rm "$x";
       logger -t TOMCAT-ROTATE-LOGS "Erasing $x [done]"; 
done

or create a logrotate config. For example: cat /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat

/var/log/tomcat/*.log {
        su tomcat tomcat
        copytruncate  
        daily  
        rotate 6  
        compress  
        missingok
}

"su tomcat tomcat" - stands for avoiding logrotate error on wrong permissions