logrotate.md

Logrotate notes

Logrotate will only remove old logs that you tell it to

What commonly trips me up is when I reduce the number of log files that logrotate is monitoring. I will take a rotation period of say 30 days and drop it to 14 (for example) and will be surprised when older files are left behind.

According to johnshen64 from serverfault.com, this is because when you say rotate 2, you are telling logrotate to only handle rotation of 2 files, not also handle purging the older files.

His post didn't cover it, but apparently the maxage setting will not assist with this specific issue.

Purge old files

This is needed if you adjust your logrotate config to rotate fewer files than it previously handled.

• find /var/log/apache2 -maxdepth 1 -mtime +<n> -name "*.log.*.gz" -delete
  • n is the number of days. For example, if your conf file handles 90 days, then using 90 here will get rid of all of the files that are no longer being handled.

References

• https://serverfault.com/questions/636844/making-logrotate-remove-old-logs-after-reducing-rotate-value
• https://serverfault.com/questions/377031/logrotate-does-not-remove-old-logs