Laravel Application Logs and Logrotate
Depending on usage, errors, and what you’ve chosen to log, the Laravel application log(s) can really grow after a while. With Laravel 3 and initially with Laravel 4, new log files were created every day by default, which kept them small and easy to search, but now Laravel 4 defaults to a single log file (which I prefer). Logrotate is a common utility on linux servers to handle the backup and rotation of server logs (Apache, syslogs, etc.) and it’s really simple to add additional logs/folders for Logrotate to handle. There’s a nice Digital Ocean tutorial for using Logrotate on Ubuntu 12.10, but here’s a quick and easy run through on how to use Logrotate with your Laravel logs:
In the shell, go to: /etc/logrotate.d In this folder are the configs that logrotate uses for different log locations (apache, mysql, syslog, apt, etc.). Create a new config: sudo touch mylaravelapp In the config file (use pico, nano, vim, whatever), add the location of the log files and the config settings:
/var/www/vhosts/[app_name]/app/storage/logs/*.log {
monthly
missingok
rotate 12
compress
notifempty
create 755 www-data www-data
}
The above code tells Logrotate to:
- look for *.log files in laravels log directory.
- create the backups monthly.
- ignore and don’t throw an error if the file(s) are missing.
- keep a year’s worth of backups. use compression (I believe gzip is the default).
- Don’t rotate the log if it’s empty.
- Create a replacement log file with the following permissions.
This last one is very important. If you create a new log file that the app cannot write to, the application will throw an error. You should also be able to use the nocreate option to just let Laravel create a new log file on it’s own the next time it needs to write to the log. To test this new config: sudo logrotate --force mylaravelapp And that should do it.