How can I keep IIS log files cleaned up regularly?

Question

I just discovered that IIS builds up logs indefinitely and there don't appear to be any IIS settings that will automatically clean out old log files. What is the best way to keep my IIS logs under control so that they don't fill the entire hard drive?

Answer 1

You'll have to run a scheduled task to do it. Here's a Powershell script that should work.

set-location c:\windows\system32\Logfiles\W3SVC1\
foreach ($File in get-childitem) {
   if ($File.LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-30)) {
      del $File
   }
}

This should purge anything that was last modified more than 30 days ago. Change the path in the first line to wherever your log files are stored. Also change the -30 to however long you want to retain the files. -30 means you will delete anything older than 30 days.

You can have a look at this article that shows different properties for the FileInfo object if you don't want to use LastWriteTime.

Answer 2

You could brew your own, but i believe some clever person has written this for you already. Check out IISLogs & IISLogs Lite!

If all your doing is deleting the logs, then you can turn logging off if its not needed! you will save your server a lot of I/O!

Answer 3

Well, if you want to clean them up regularly then why don't you disable request logging in IIS? You may use something like google analytics or some other service, I see many people dong this to avoid the headache with IIS logs affecting performance and eating up all disk space but it all depends on your requirements of course.