Comprehensive Guide to Logrotate: Configuration, Usage, and Custom Scripts for Linux Log Management

Logrotate is a Linux log file management tool that rotates, compresses, and removes old logs to save disk space.

The main configuration file is /etc/logrotate.conf and additional per‑service configs reside in /etc/logrotate.d/ .

Logrotate runs daily via /etc/cron.daily/logrotate ; the script calls /usr/sbin/logrotate with the main config.

Common command‑line options include -d (debug), -f (force), -v (verbose), and others for mail, state, etc.

Example Nginx configuration in /etc/logrotate.d/nginx shows daily rotation, keeping 7 files, using dateext , and a postrotate script that reloads Nginx.

# /etc/logrotate.d/nginx
/usr/local/nginx/logs/*.log {
    daily
    rotate 7
    missingok
    notifempty
    dateext
    sharedscripts
    postrotate
        if [ -f /usr/local/nginx/logs/nginx.pid ]; then
            kill -USR1 `cat /usr/local/nginx/logs/nginx.pid`
        fi
    endscript
}

Similar snippets are provided for php‑fpm, Tomcat, system logs, and a custom logrotate-nginx.sh shell script that moves, renames, compresses, and cleans up old logs.

#!/bin/bash
mkdir -p /data/nginx_logs/days
/usr/sbin/logrotate -vf /etc/logrotate.d/nginx
time=$(date -d "yesterday" +"%Y-%m-%d")
cd /data/nginx_logs/days
for i in $(ls ./ | grep "^\(.*\)\.[[:digit:]]$"); do
    mv ${i} ./$(echo ${i}|sed -n 's/^\(.*\)\.\([[:digit:]]\)$/\1/p')-${time}
 done
for i in $(ls ./ | grep "^\(.*\)-[[:digit:]-]\+$"); do
    tar jcvf ${i}.bz2 ./${i}
    rm -rf ./${i}
 done
find /data/nginx_logs/days/* -name "*.bz2" -mtime 7 -type f -exec rm -rf {} \;

Python and shell scripts are also shown for generic log rotation, illustrating how to move yesterday’s logs into date‑based directories and trigger service restarts.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import datetime, os, shutil
log_path = '/opt/jumpserver/logs/'
log_file = 'jumpserver.log'
yesterday = datetime.datetime.now() - datetime.timedelta(days=1)
os.makedirs(os.path.join(log_path, yesterday.strftime('%Y'), yesterday.strftime('%m')))
shutil.move(log_path+log_file,
    os.path.join(log_path, yesterday.strftime('%Y'), yesterday.strftime('%m'),
    f"{log_file}_{yesterday.strftime('%Y%m%d')}.log"))
os.popen("sudo /opt/jumpserver/service.sh restart")

Finally, the article explains how to adjust the default cron timing (via /etc/anacrontab ) to run logrotate at a desired hour, and provides a simple gzip‑based cleanup script for old log files.