Why and How to create a logrotate in Linux?

Why ?

In Linux one of the great feature that you can manage and organize any log file to be rotated on any criteria , for example if you have web service that will create a file.log and you want to have instead a daily file and nominated with that date , or/and have a specify size and/or number of files ..etc , you may use logrotate feature to achieve this.

How ?

Below are sample script to rotate a catalina.out file which is the main tomcat log file in daily bases and compress it and keep it for one year, the new file will be date only and orginal file will be kept same as it  ,:

1- may use man to check all features of logrotate:

man logrotate

2- create the configuration file under logrotate.d :

vi /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat

/<path_to_logs>/catalina.out

{

su user group

copytruncate

compress

daily

missingok

delaycompress

dateext

maxage 365

}

3- You may force the logrotate to run immediately instead of wait for next day.

logrotate –fv /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat