How to configure Catalina log rotation

Overview

This page explains how to configure the Catalina log rotation. This practice can prove efficacious in situations such as "disk is full" or when a user has a specific need for custom rotation rules.

Use Information

The current active log, as well as older files, can be found here: /var/log/tomcat.

The Catalina rotation log may already have default settings present.

Instructions

1. ssh to the Matillion host and become root using the sudo su - command.

2. Create the /etc/logrotate.d/tomcatrotate file with the following contents:

Important Information

Please note that the file to be created in step 2 does not yet exist, and therefore you need to create it yourself as the step suggests.

/var/log/tomcat*/catalina.out {
    copytruncate
    weekly
    dateext
    rotate 52
    compress
    missingok
    create 0644 tomcat tomcat
}

The above configuration maintains the last 52 files. Please note that size takes precedence over time.

3. Manually run the "rotate logs" command:

sudo logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.d/tomcatrotate

To validate that the manual log rotation was successful, run the following command from the SSH session:

sudo ls -trl /var/log/tomcat

In the command line results, you should see an archived catalina.out file with the following name format: catalina.out-YYYYMMDD.gz where YYYYMMDD represents the current date.

You will now see a very small (or possibly even empty) catalina.out file.

Step 3 (above) will rotate the logs. Please note that from that point, rotation will happen automatically.