logrotate cron job not rotating certain logs

logging cron cron-task logrotate log-rotation
Ashok picture Ashok · Mar 27, 2013 · Viewed 22.7k times · Source

I added two scripts in "logrotate.d" directory for my application logs to be rotated. This is the config for one of them:

<myLogFilePath> {
  compress
  copytruncate
  delaycompress
  dateext
  missingok
  notifempty
  daily
  rotate 30
}

There is a "logrotate" script in "cron.daily" directory (which seems to be running daily as per cron logs):

#!/bin/sh

echo "logrotate_test" >>/tmp/logrotate_test
#/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf >/dev/null 2>&1
/usr/sbin/logrotate -v /etc/logrotate.conf &>>/root/logrotate_error

EXITVALUE=$?
if [ $EXITVALUE != 0 ]; then
    /usr/bin/logger -t logrotate "ALERT exited abnormally with [$EXITVALUE]"
fi
exit 0

The first echo statement is working.
But I find my application logs alone are not getting rotated, whereas other logs like httpd are getting rotated **
**And I also don't see any output in the mentioned "logrotate_error" file (has write permission for all users).

However the syslog says: "logrotate: ALERT exited abnormally with [1]"

But when I run the same "logrotate" in "cron.daily" script manually, everything seems working fine.

Why is it not rotating during daily cron schedule? Am I doing something wrong here?
It would be great if I get this much needed help.

UPDATED: It looks like, it's because of selinux - the log files in my user home directory has restrictions imposed by selinux and the when logrotate script is run:

SELinux is preventing /usr/sbin/logrotate from getattr access on the file /home/user/logs/application.log

Answer

Ashok picture Ashok · May 24, 2013

SELinux was restricting the access to logrotate on log files in directories which does not have the required SELinux file context type. "/var/log" directory has "var_log_t" file context, and logrotate was able to do the needful. So the solution was to set this on my application log files and it's parent directory:

semanage fcontext -a -t var_log_t <directory/logfile>
restorecon -v <directory/logfile>

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