logrotate not working

Question

I want to set up daily logrotate for my Tomcat server' catalina.out log file but it's not working - I haven't seen the rotated log files created.
To troubleshoot, I ran logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf and got the following:

rotating pattern: /usr/local/tomcat/logs/catalina.out  5242880 bytes (7 rotations)
empty log files are rotated, old logs are removed
considering log /usr/local/tomcat/logs/catalina.out
  log needs rotating
rotating log /usr/local/tomcat/logs/catalina.out, log->rotateCount is 7
dateext suffix '-20151223'
glob pattern '-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]'
glob finding old rotated logs failed
copying /usr/local/tomcat/logs/catalina.out to /usr/local/tomcat/logs/catalina.out-20151223
truncating /usr/local/tomcat/logs/catalina.out
compressing log with: /bin/gzip 

It seems like everything is working without any error. However, there is no results:

[root@gec logrotate.d]# ls -lrth /usr/local/tomcat/logs/cata*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  398 Dec  4 17:48 /usr/local/tomcat/logs/catalina.2015-12-04.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 109M Dec 23 17:21 /usr/local/tomcat/logs/catalina.out 

My /etc/logrotate.conf:

daily

rotate 7

# create new (empty) log files after rotating old ones
create

# use date as a suffix of the rotated file
dateext

# uncomment this if you want your log files compressed
#compress

# RPM packages drop log rotation information into this directory
include /etc/logrotate.d 

My /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat:

/usr/local/tomcat/logs/catalina.out {
    copytruncate
    daily
    rotate 7
    compress
    missingok
    size 5M
}  

What is wrong?

Updates:

Interestingly, running logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf creates the rotation gzip files!

[root@gec logrotate.d]# ls -lrth /usr/local/tomcat/logs/cata*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  398 Dec  4 17:48 /usr/local/tomcat/logs/catalina.2015-12-04.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.1M Dec 23 17:26 /usr/local/tomcat/logs/catalina.out-20151223.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 109K Dec 23 17:27 /usr/local/tomcat/logs/catalina.out

However, how do I know whether the daily cron job will work?

Answer 1

You are running logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf with -d argument.

The -d argument is debug mode, you can say kind of "dry-run". It will only give you info if the logrotate will work but will not rotate the logs.

The logrotate -f worked since the -f argument specifies logrotate to force the logrotate.

Quoting from the manual of logrotate:

• -d, --debug

  Turns on debug mode and implies -v. In debug mode, no changes will be made to the logs or to the logrotate state file.

• -f, --force Tells logrotate to force the rotation, even if it doesn't think this is necessary. Sometimes this is useful after adding new
  entries to a logrotate config file, or if old log files have been
  removed by hand, as the new files will be created, and logging
  will continue correctly.

If the logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf gave you output that the log will be rotate and compressed then it will surely rotate it when logrotate will go through your configuration file.

Answer 2

In /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat try notifempty