How To Change the Tomcat Log Rotation

Overview

This article describes a method to reduce the limit the number of days that Tomcat logs are held on a Swivel appliance.

System Requirements

• Swivel appliance (Hardware or Virtual)

Edit the logrotate configuration

The Swivel appliance uses logrotate to control various log rotations on the system. The Tomcat log rotations are configured using the following file:

/etc/logrotate.d/tomcat

This can be edited using WinSCP. See WinSCP How To Guide.

By default the /var/log/tomcat/catalina.out log files are rotated every 90 days, whilst the /var/log/tomcat/*.log files are rotated every 120 days. This means that 90 days and 120 days worth of log files will be retained indefinitely, respectively.

To alter these values, locate and edit the /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat file using WinSCP and change the values in the file from:

/var/log/tomcat/catalina.out {
        daily
        rotate 90
       size=1M
        notifempty
        missingok
        copytruncate
        compress
}

/var/log/tomcat/*.log {
        daily
        missingok
        copytruncate
        rotate 120
        missingok
        compress
}

To be for example 7 days:

/var/log/tomcat/catalina.out {
        daily
        rotate 7
        size=1M
        notifempty
        missingok
        copytruncate
        compress
}

/var/log/tomcat/*.log {
        daily
        missingok
        copytruncate
        rotate 7
        missingok
        compress
}

Important Note

These logs are contained within the appliance backup each night at 4am so please do not increase these values beyond the defaults specified. By reducing these values you will decrease backup time and increase the space available on the /backups partition.