I changed the generation count of logrotate to delete old log files, so I’ll introduce the configuration method.

Changing the generation count of log files managed by logrotate

Let’s look at the default logrotate configuration for Nginx as an example.

/etc/logrotate.d/nginx

/var/log/nginx/*.log {
        daily
        missingok
        rotate 52
        compress
        delaycompress
        notifempty
        create 640 nginx adm
        sharedscripts
        postrotate
                [ -f /var/run/nginx.pid ] && kill -USR1 `cat /var/run/nginx.pid`
        endscript
}

rotate is the number of generations to retain log files.

By default it’s 52, so if logrotate runs once a day, it retains log files for 52 days. In my case, 7 days is sufficient, so I changed it to rotate 7.

Even after changing the configuration, old log files won’t be automatically deleted, so you need to manually delete them with commands like rm -f access.log-*.gz.

That’s all from the Gemba where I wanted to change logrotate settings to free up server disk space.