How to rotate your Apache Log Files?

Cpanel does a good job with rotating Apache log files for the different domains on a cpanel/WHM server, but they are still not doing anything good to rotate the main Apache log files. To prevent problems on your server you need to setup log file rotation yourself. This should be done on every Apache web server and not just on a Cpanel server. Here is an easy way to do it.



Log into your server via SSH and switch to the root user. Now create a file for Apache log file rotation:



# vi /etc/logrotate.d/httpd



VI comes up with the new file open. Now add the following content to the new file:



/var/log/httpd/*log {
missingok
notifempty
sharedscripts
postrotate
/bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/httpd.pid 2>/dev/null` 2> /dev/null || true
endscript
}



Save the file and you are all done. But hold on. What if you wanted to go a little more sophisticated? Consider the following to extend your logging and to keep log files around for a while.



/var/log/httpd/*log {

weekly

rotate 52

compress
missingok
notifempty
sharedscripts
postrotate
/bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/httpd.pid 2>/dev/null` 2> /dev/null || true
endscript
}



Save it and you are done. What does this actually do? Here are all options explained for you:



The log files are now rotated on a weekly base. The "52" is equal to 52 weeks before log files are overwritten. To save on disk space the log files are compressed accordingly. "missingok" tells the rotation job to continue to the next file if a log file is missing and not to trigger an error. If a log file is empty it will not be rotated (notifempty). The last two options are not really critical to know for now. All we really care about are the options specified.