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.

You have "notifempty" in your configuration. Is your catalina.out file not empty? (If you configure logging property, the file should be empty. - I mean if you configure your system to log everything to proper files instead of writing to System.out/System.err/Console). — Konstantin Kolinko, Dec 14 '18 at 19:55
it definitely is not empty, as you can see when I debug it, it says that log needs rotating — Justin, Dec 14 '18 at 19:58
As which user are you running logrotate manual? And as which user is the logrotate service running? Try to execute it manual as the same user the service is running and add the ‘—verbose’ flag to the command to get more details! — rfkortekaas, Dec 16 '18 at 15:52
I tried running as the user defined `su opc opc` and the log rotated correctly — Justin, Dec 18 '18 at 23:05

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 11 '20 at 14:34

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...

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 14 '19 at 22:30

Since this is getting a lot of views, I will let you all know the solution I found.

I could not get logrotate to work on catalina.out, so sorry if that's what you're looking for.

What I was able to do is stop catalina.out from ever getting generated. To do this, I created a file called setenv.sh in apache-tomee-plus-7.0.4/bin, and put this line in it

export CATALINA_OUT="/dev/null"

When tomee is started up, it looks something like this in catalina.sh

eval $_NOHUP "\"$_RUNJAVA\"" "\"$LOGGING_CONFIG\"" $LOGGING_MANAGER $JAVA_OPTS $CATALINA_OPTS \
  -classpath "\"$CLASSPATH\"" \
  -Djava.security.manager \
  -Djava.security.policy=="\"$CATALINA_BASE/conf/catalina.policy\"" \
  -Dcatalina.base="\"$CATALINA_BASE\"" \
  -Dcatalina.home="\"$CATALINA_HOME\"" \
  -Djava.io.tmpdir="\"$CATALINA_TMPDIR\"" \
  org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap "$@" start \
  >> "$CATALINA_OUT" 2>&1 "&"

so outputting to a file seems necessary to run this tomee in the background. outputting to /dev/null lets it output somewhere, but it just goes nowhere

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 20 '21 at 22:21

2

It's easy with rotatelogs from Apache. Just the set env property:

CATALINA_OUT_CMD="/usr/sbin/rotatelogs -f $CATALINA_BASE/logs/catalina.out.%Y-%m-%d.log 86400"

It will create a named pipe catalina.out so it can be rotated without restarting Tomcat.

For more info see catalina.sh file.

answered Nov 20 '21 at 22:21

Pavel Novák

168
1
5

1

rotatelogs is part of Apache HTTPD, and as such it is an external dependency. – Attila Csipak Jul 28 '22 at 12:39

score -4 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 28 '19 at 11:57

-4

From the output of logrotate.status, it is clear that catalina.out is not being controlled by logrotate.

In the file /etc/logrotate.conf, please check for the line

include /etc/logrotate.d

If this line is not present, add it. Only if this line is present, configurations added inside /etc/logrotate.d will be considered.

answered Jun 28 '19 at 11:57

Sreeragh A R

2,871
3
27
54

1

How about this fragment `considering log /apache-tomee-plus-7.0.4/logs/catalina.out log needs rotating` – Philipp Grigoryev Dec 28 '19 at 21:15

logrotate doesn't rotate catalina.out

4 Answers4

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