logrotate doesn't rotate catalina.out

Question

I am trying to use logrotate to rotate out tomcat's catalina.out automatically on a daily basis even though I can manually call logrotate and it works fine. I am using I have tried every solution out there, but I cannot get it to rotate. I am on Oracle Linux 7.5 which is basically RHEL 7.

Here are the steps I have taken:

I created a file /etc/logrotate.d/tomee.conf that looks like this:

    /apache-tomee-plus-7.0.4/logs/catalina.out
    {
        su opc opc
        daily
        rotate 7
        compress
        notifempty
        missingok
        copytruncate
    }

I can manually execute the logrotate and it works just fine using sudo /usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf

I also attempt to debug using sudo /usr/sbin/logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf and the output has no errors

    ...
    rotating pattern: /apache-tomee-plus-7.0.4/logs/catalina.out
     after 1 days (7 rotations)
    empty log files are not rotated, old logs are removed
    switching euid to 1000 and egid to 1000
    considering log /apache-tomee-plus-7.0.4/logs/catalina.out
      log needs rotating
    rotating log /apache-tomee-plus-7.0.4/logs/catalina.out, log->rotateCount is 7
    dateext suffix '-20181211'
    glob pattern '-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]'
    copying /apache-tomee-plus-7.0.4/logs/catalina.out to /apache-tomee-plus-7.0.4/logs/catalina.out-20181211
    truncating /apache-tomee-plus-7.0.4/logs/catalina.out
    compressing log with: /bin/gzip
    switching euid to 0 and egid to 0
    ...

But it still doesn't do it automatically daily.

I also know that logrotate is running because according to /var/lib/logrotate/logrotate.status, other logs are being rotated, but not catalina.out

    cat /var/lib/logrotate/logrotate.status
    logrotate state -- version 2
    "/var/log/yum.log" 2018-11-29-18:44:14
    "/var/log/up2date" 2018-9-17-19:0:0
    "/apache-tomee-plus-7.0.4/logs/catalina.out" 2018-12-8-0:37:14
    "/var/log/chrony/*.log" 2018-9-17-19:0:0
    "/var/log/wtmp" 2018-12-3-17:48:49
    "/var/log/spooler" 2018-11-29-18:44:14
    "/var/log/btmp" 2018-12-3-17:48:49
    "/var/log/iscsiuio.log" 2018-9-17-19:0:0
    "/var/log/maillog" 2018-12-11-3:7:1
    "/var/log/secure" 2018-12-11-3:7:1
    "/var/log/messages" 2018-12-11-3:7:1
    "/var/account/pacct" 2018-9-17-19:0:0
    "/var/log/cron" 2018-12-11-3:7:1

notice that there are multiple entries that say it was rotated on 12-11, but catalina.out wasn't rotated since 12-8, but it still isn't rotating.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

This is an old case, I see that, but I felt I should add my solution as it does rotate the logs, which was the original question.

In my case, I set up the /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat file in more or less the same manner as Justin did in the initial question:

/<apache-location>/tomcat/logs/catalina.out {
  daily    
  copytruncate
  rotate 180
  compress
  missingok
  maxsize 200M
}

(my apache location is weird, so substitute as appropriate. The rotate 180 keeps my logs for about 30 days, if my math isn't too far off (24h * 30 days = 720h --> if rotating every 4 hours, that yields 720 / 4 = 180 times --> keep 180 log files).)

but I trigger the execution from a normal cronjob, as such:

0 */4 * * * /usr/sbin/logrotate -vf /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat >> /var/log/cut.log 2>&1

To rotate daily, just adjust the first part of the cronjob to e.g. 0 0 * * * (midnight every day).

The -vf options are to turn on verbose (for logging the cron) and to force the execution of the rotation. The /var/log/cut.log is a file I've added specifically for logging of the cron job. The >> /var/log/cut.log 2>&1 could of course be dropped.

I'm running the rotation/cron job as root user.

This seems to work on my systems, after having had a lot of trouble initially. Not sure that this is the ideal solution, but at least I've avoided that the catalina.out grows into the heavens and above, which was my main goal, and I suspect also the goal with the original question...