Rotating and Archiving Logs

CustomLog "|bin/rotatelogs /var/logs/apachelog 86400" common

If you have a website with high traffic, your log files will quickly grow in size. While you can always archive the log files by hand, there are a number of mechanisms to rotate logs periodically, archiving and compressing older logs at well-defined intervals.

To avoid having to stop or restart the server when manipulating the log files, a common solution is to use an intermediate program to log the requests. The program will in turn take care of rotating, compressing, and archiving the logs.

Apache provides the rotatelogs tool for this purpose. You can find a similar, alternative program at http://cronolog.org/.

This example uses the rotatelogs tool to create a new log file and move the current log to the /var/logs directory daily (86400 is the number of seconds in one day). Check the Apache documentation for details on how to use rotatelogs to also rotate logs based on size and name archived files based on a template.

Caution

If the path to the log rotation program includes spaces, you might need to escape them by prefixing them with a \ (backslash). This is especially common in the Windows platform.