easy cheasy log rotation in your rails' apps

dot-gitignore

log/*

logrotate-initializer.rb

# file: config/initializers/logrotate.rb
#
# we don't really need to run locally from 'rails server' or 'rails console'
#
# but when we're fired up under passenger, unicorn, or whatever we'll rotate
# our logs on startup and periodically while running (bout every 42 minutes)
#
# 

unless defined?(Rails::Server) or defined?(Rails::Console)

  Thread.new do
    Thread.current.abort_on_exception = true

    sleep(rand(16))

    loop do
      `#{ Rails.root }/script/logrotate`
      sleep(rand(60 * 42))
    end
  end

end

logrotate-script.rb

# file: ./script/logrotate

#! /usr/bin/env ruby
# encoding: utf-8
#
# this script generates a simple and sane logrotate config file and runs
# logrotate using it.  you can run it whenever using
#
# ./script/logrotate
#
# it's run automatically using
#
#   config/initializers/logrotate.rb
#
# so you can deploy and not have to think about log rotation
#

exit(42) unless DATA.flock(File::LOCK_EX | File::LOCK_NB).zero?

config = DATA.read

script_dir = File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__))
rails_root = File.dirname(script_dir)

cmd = "logrotate #{ ARGV.join(' ') } -v -s ./log/logrotate.status ./log/logrotate.conf"

Dir.chdir(rails_root) do
  open('./log/logrotate.conf', 'w') do |fd|
    fd.write(config % rails_root)
  end

  puts "### #{ cmd }\n\n"
  exec(cmd)
end

__END__
"%s/log/*.log" {
  weekly
  missingok
  rotate 4
  compress
  delaycompress
  notifempty
  copytruncate
}