FAQ › Installation and system operation

Rotating production.log of Redmine

Created on 2009-09-13  •  MAEDA Go

Applications developed with Ruby on Rails, such as Redmine, keep appending information to log/production.log. To prevent the file from growing and using up disk space, consider rotating the log at regular intervals.

Method 1: Use the Rails logger

If you add a Logger setting to config/additional_environment.rb of Redmine, the log is rotated at a fixed size or at a fixed interval.

For example, with the following setting, the log is rotated every time it reaches 10 MB, and up to 10 generations are kept.

config.logger = Logger.new("log/#{Rails.env}.log", 10, 10240000)

If you specify daily, weekly, or monthly as the second parameter, the log is rotated every day, every week, or every month. The following is an example of daily rotation.

config.logger = Logger.new("log/#{Rails.env}.log", 'daily')

You can check the parameters for Logger.new in the reference manual of the Ruby Logger class.
https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.4/Logger.html#method-c-new

Method 2: Use logrotate on Linux

If you run Redmine on Linux, you can use logrotate for this task.

Create a file with the following content under /etc/logrotate.d/. On Red Hat family distributions such as CentOS, the log is then rotated early on Sunday morning.

Example of a logrotate configuration
(when the Redmine installation directory is /var/lib/redmine)

/var/lib/redmine/log/*log {
    missingok      # Do not report an error if the file does not exist
    notifempty     #
    copytruncate   # Copy the log under another name, and then empty the original file
    compress       # Compress and keep old logs
}

Configuration options of logrotate

Rotation method

Rotation interval

Related topics

• Reducing the information recorded in production.log of Redmine