How do I work around the fact that Apache needs to be restart to rotate the logs?

Question

It seems so "primitive" that HTTPD has to be restarted just to rotate the logs. There has got be other ways to accomplish this!

Note that I do not use nor wish to use AWStats, one of the ways to solve this problem.

Using CentOS 5.x on a dedicated server.

You don't need to restart apache to rotate the logs. According to this, you need only send a SIGHUP to the PID listed in the PidFile, and apache will close and reopen its logfiles.
What are you using to rotate your logs?? logrotate should take care of this for you...

quanta · Answer 1 · 2011-09-22 16:00:51Z

up vote 5 down vote accepted

No need to restart, reload is enough:

/sbin/service httpd reload > /dev/null 2>/dev/null || true

answered Sep 22 '11 at 16:00

quanta
16k1631

	I have "/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd graceful ; sleep 5" Can I just replace it with the line above? – Gaia Sep 22 '11 at 18:40
	`reload` send a HUP signal to the process. `graceful`, as its mean, doesn't terminate the currently open connections. A side effect is the old log files will not be closed immediately. – quanta Sep 23 '11 at 2:11

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