How do I enable log rotation?

[revington]

newrelic_agent.log is growing very fast in our set up. How I can enable log rotation?

[othiym23]

Right now, there's no way to set up log rotation from within the agent yourself. You can use logrotate or similar tools to manage the New Relic logs like any other process's, although that requires a server restart. You can also manually upgrade the newrelic module to use the newest version of bunyan and then do some light hacking of lib/logger.js to set up a rotation policy. We use the last version of bunyan that doesn't depend on dtrace-provider, because while dtrace-provider is an optional dependency, its presence complicates deploying to PaaS environments where no toolchain is present, at least in terms of support.

Finally, you can try just setting the logging level to be 'info' or 'warn', if you're not already. Higher levels are really only useful for troubleshooting, and will slow down your app in production to boot. If it's logging too much at 'info' or higher, we probably need to make the module less chatty.

Thanks for getting in touch! Sorry we don't have a more immediately satisfying resolution!

[revington]

Ok, not going to hack into lib/logger.js probably redirecting to stderr and piping stderr to https://github.com/dstokes/logrotate-stream is good solution.

[othiym23]

That's a great idea! Let us know how that goes and maybe we'll add a note to the documentation!

[Azrael808]

Just came across this issue and wondered if the trick to not requiring a server restart if opting for the logrotate option is to simply add the "copytruncate" parameter to the configuration?

That's how Ruby application logs can be rotated without requiring a server restart, so I would assume it would work the same with the NewRelic Ruby agent. I'll give it a go and let you know!

[Azrael808]

So, my initial tests seem to suggest that does work. Example config:

/path/to/logs {
daily
missingok
rotate 7
compress
dateext
notifempty
copytruncate
}