Logrotate Tomcat log file

Question

I am writing Tomcat log with this setting:

• Log configured using an AccessLogValve in server.xml

  Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" directory="logs/access"
  prefix="access" suffix=".log" pattern="common" rotatable="false"
  

• Use logrotate to rotate the log file daily and remove old log files.

  /app/logs/access/access.log {
      daily
      dateext
      missingok
      rotate 14
      maxage 14
      compress
      delaycompress
      dateyesterday }
  

The strange thing is that every day the log file is changed to a new name by logrotate, for example access.log-20171222, and a new log file access.log is created. However, Tomcat still writes log to the renamed file.

My solution now is adding the option copytruncate to the configuration file of logrotate. However, with this option, there is a chance of losing some log at the time of truncating.

Can anyone suggest a better solution?

Thank you.

Answer 1

According to this documentation you should keep the rotatable option as true (default) so that it does not write always to the same file. Also you can format the filename string to a fixed value, so that you do not get dates on them. Just be sure to run logrotate before the internal rotation so that the new log does not risk overwriting the last (as it gets renamed).