Rotating mongrel cluster log filesEdit

Redirected from Rotating Rails application log files

Created , updated

In my set-up both mongrel cluster and my Rails application itself log to the same directory, and I wind up with a bunch of log files that look like this:

  • access_log
  • access_log.1
  • development.log
  • error_log
  • migrations.log
  • mongrel.123.log
  • mongrel.124.log
  • mongrel.125.log
  • mongrel.126.log
  • production.log
  • test.log

The files ending in _log are actually nginx log files and are handled separately (see "nginx log rotation"); you can see that at the time I took this snapshot the file access_log had already been rotated once, producing access_log.1.

The files of the form mongrel.123.log, where 123 is the port number a particular mongrel instance is listening on, are created by mongrel cluster and are generally very small.

Finally, the remaining .log files are produced by the Rails application itself and can get huge.

Setting up logrotate

Seeing as all the files I am interested in rotating end with .log I am going to handle them all in one hit. I created a file at /etc/logrotate.d/rails with the following contents:

/home/*/deploy/shared/log/*.log {
    missingok
    notifempty
    copytruncate
}

To test this file out:

# -d (debug) causes a verbose dry-run
sudo logrotate -d /etc/logwatch.conf /etc/logrotate.d/rails

# add -f (force) to force rotation even if its not needed
sudo logrotate -d -f /etc/logwatch.conf /etc/logrotate.d/rails

# if all that looks good, do a real (non-dry) run with verbose output turned on
sudo logrotate -v /etc/logwatch.conf /etc/logrotate.d/rails

# or with -f if needed:
# sudo logrotate -v /etc/logwatch.conf /etc/logrotate.d/rails

I opted to go with the copytruncate option because it enables me to rotate the logs without incurring an expensive restart (seeing as Rails is so slow to cycle up) and without worrying about undocumented and possibly unsupported (at least as far as I can tell) signals being sent to the mongrel processes.

See also