What is the best way to rotate logs for rails application

Question

I have a 1GB slice from slicehost and I have 4 projects running on that box. All 4 applications are ruby on rails application. I was wondering what is the best way to ensure that log files are rotated.

I would prefer to have 4 different log files one for each app rather than having one big log file for all 4 applications.

I am running ubuntu.

I am running passenger.

Answer 1

This is meta-programming and whether it should be on ServerFault or SO is debatable.

logrotate, a standard package for a number of operating systems, and you can apt-get install logrotate to get it if you do not already. It can be coerced into rotating whatever logs you want, using whatever schedule you want, and with differing policies a la "gzip 7 days then rm" per-file.

Investigate /etc/logrotate.d.

Answer 2

I also use logrotate (you'll have to install via apt-get). Create a new logrotate file in your /etc/logrotate.d/ directory. Here's an example of one of mine:

# for the rails logs
/home/apps/*/shared/log/*log {
  daily
  rotate 14
  notifempty
  missingok
  compress
  sharedscripts
  postrotate
    /usr/bin/touch /home/apps/application1/current/tmp/restart.txt
    /usr/bin/touch /home/apps/application2/current/tmp/restart.txt
  endscript
}
# for the apache logs
/home/apps/logs/*log {
  daily
  rotate 14
  notifempty
  missingok
  compress
  sharedscripts
  postrotate
    /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
  endscript
}

This rotates both rails production.log logs and the apache access/error logs (I run my apps under passenger).