logrotate for virtual host logs

In this post I'll explain how to set up log rotation for virutal host logs. This setup is independant of the web server being used.

Let's start by creating a separate configuration file:

vim /etc/logrotate.d/vhost

In that file we specify which log files should be automaticaly rotated. In our case we will use a regular expression that matches files somewhere inside /srv/www/ but from the logs/ directory and with the .log ending.

/srv/www/*/logs/*.log {
  rotate 8
  weekly
  size 256M
  compress
  delaycompress
  sharedscripts

  postrotate
    /usr/sbin/apache2ctl graceful > /dev/null
  endscript
}

This configuration has the following characteristics:

• rotate logs 8 times
• rotate logs on a weekly basis
• rotate logs if logs file are bigger than 256M
• compress logs when they're archived
• delay compress till next rotation
• sharedscripts means that the postrotate script is executed once for all logs matching the wildcarded pattern