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I have logrotate running in an EC2 AWS machine rotating Apache logs. Once packed, Apache logs are saved into AWS S3 via s3fs. The problem is that I recently noticed that I didn't have logs rotated. In S3 I have old logs from day 48->60 but the 1->47 doesn't appear.

My question is: Where does logrotate save its own log? It's possible that I have some kind of problem with s3fs, but I need to know before I do anything. I tried to find somewhere the logs but I couldn't find it out.

Any idea?

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6 Answers 6

Reset to default
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logrotate does not log anything by default. normally it should be in your cron somewhere, for instance:

$ grep -r -- 'logrotate.conf' /etc/cron*
/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf

You can either run that manually to see what is wrong, or redirect the logrotate output to a file in the above cron to see what happened next day.

Likely somewhere the config is incorrect and caused the logrotate run to break.

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  • 3
    +1 on running logrotate manually to see what's wrong
    – cjc
    Apr 19, 2012 at 12:20
  • thanks for the answer, but what I really want to know what has happened in my system to get this kind result. Thank's!
    – enedebe
    Apr 19, 2012 at 21:26
  • does manually run logrotate give any errors? if there are errors, you need to fix them in the conf file or /etc/logrotate.d/apache (or apache2).
    – johnshen64
    Apr 19, 2012 at 21:50
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    You can use the -d debug flag and the -f force flag to see exactly what logrotate is attempting to do. -d disables action but the printed messages will still claim they're changing things.
    – David Lord
    Jul 23, 2015 at 3:44
  • 1
    When running /usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf, I'd add -v to see the detailed log.
    – Dennis Golomazov
    Nov 18, 2019 at 13:25
22

The only thing that logrotate records normally is in cat /var/lib/logrotate/status.

This is taken from https://serverfault.com/a/518134/266525

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    It turns out there are differences in the actual path depending on the distribution and version used. Check the linked serverfault answer and it's comments for details.
    – Attila Csipak
    Oct 1, 2020 at 12:46
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    /var/lib/logrotate/logrotate.status on my CentOS 7 system.
    – rinogo
    Oct 2, 2020 at 18:25
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Another good place to look is /var/log/messages on CentOS for errors such as this from the cron.daily /etc/cron.daily/logrotate

logrotate: ALERT exited abnormally with [1]

You can also run in debug mode manually and check for errors:

/usr/sbin/logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf

Source: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/32831

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4

If you're running logrotate from cron and not redirecting the output, the output, if there is any, will go to email for whichever ID is running the cron job. I redirect my output to a log file.

For example:

25 3 * * 7 /usr/sbin/logrotate -s /home/user/conf/mwarelogrotate.state 
/home/user/conf/mwarelogrotate.conf >> /home/user/logs/logrotate.log 2>&1
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2

When logrotate doesn't rotate logs or enters failed state, it's a good idea to run logorate manually in debug mode to see what errors it lists, like this:

/usr/sbin/logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.d/*

This command tests rotating the logs for all the services that have files located in /etc/logrotate.d. If it lists errors (such as errors caused by duplicate log entries), you'll know why logrotate has problems.

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1

Check /etc/logrotate.conf for global config settings that may be affecting tasks configured through /etc/logrotate.d/

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