[TIL] logrotate: how to prevent deletion of old logs

February 10, 2022·1 min readlogrotate

TIL that in a logrotate configuration file, with setting daily configured, if rotate is not explicitly set, old rotated log files will be deleted (after one rotation, it seems).

To avoid this, set rotate n, where n is the number of logs to be kept.

Haven’t found a way to completely disable deletion. Common practice seems to be setting rotate with a high number. See:

• https://serverfault.com/questions/50181/how-i-configure-logrotate-to-not-delete-my-log-files-after-rotation
• https://serverfault.com/questions/377031/logrotate-does-not-remove-old-logs
• https://serverfault.com/questions/694935/logrotate-how-change-it-so-that-it-never-deletes-logs-and-will-create-a-gz-ev

Example of the configuration file I’m referring to:

/nginx-logs/access.log
/nginx-logs/error.log
{
    daily
    rotate 30
    dateext
    dateformat .%Y-%m-%d
    extension .log
    sharedscripts
    compress
    postrotate
      sudo docker kill --signal=USR1 nginx
    endscript
}