5

I've found an example of doing log rotation in Nginx here

But a simple test with:

    set $date "2018-08-24";
    access_log /home/tim/log/access-http-$date.log default;

produces a log file named access-http-.log. I'm using nginx 1.13.6 (with openresty).

Update

After much hacking & tweaking, I've come up with the following logrotate script to rotate the different log files that nginx produces. I've put it into /etc/logrotate. The remaining issue is that the logs don't rotate daily (I'm unsure why at present), but a logrotate -f <filename> produces exactly the result I want.

An interesting note is that nginx -s reload can be used instead of USR1. That's unfortunately not referenced in the nginx logging page but I found it (in the man page IIRC). I build openresty/nginx manually to incorporate extra modules I need so I don't get various extras that come in the packaged version like the pid keeping.

/path/to/log/access-http.log /path/to/log/access-https.log /path/to/log/api.log /path/to/log/error.log {
    daily
    missingok
    notifempty
    create 664 nobody tim
    dateext
    dateformat -%Y-%m-%d
    dateyesterday
    rotate 10
    su tim tim
    postrotate
        /usr/local/bin/openresty -s reload
    endscript
}

I figure this will be useful for anyone with a large nginx config serving both web pages and an API. I keep the http separate as I don't serve non-https pages and it keeps the script kiddie crap out of my page logs.

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3
  • Have you tried actually doing what is documented in that tutorial? Commented Aug 24, 2018 at 1:46
  • I've tried the command that sets the $year, $month and $day variables. And then tried access_log /home/tim/log/access-$year.log; Same log file name . Commented Aug 24, 2018 at 1:50
  • I can only confirm that your simple test pasted above, works in my setup Commented Sep 12, 2018 at 9:23

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
6

Just set a cron task for a minute to midnight to move the logfile and rename it with the date and then send a USR1 signal to Nginx. This will trigger it to reopen log files and create a new one for the following day.

59 23 * * * mv /var/log/nginx/access.log /var/log/nginx/$(date +%F).access.log && kill -USR1 $(cat /run/nginx.pid)
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4
  • 3
    why not to use logrotate for this? Commented Sep 12, 2018 at 9:06
  • Because I can do it in a single line of bash Commented Sep 12, 2018 at 10:35
  • but then you cannot ask that one line of code to save only 14 days of historic logs, supposing that this feature is wanted. Commented Feb 21, 2020 at 6:49
  • True. I'll need a second line of code to delete the log files which are more than 14 days old. Commented Feb 21, 2020 at 18:56

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