How to Rotate Tomcat catalina.out

How to automatically rotate catalina.out daily or when it becomes bigger than 5M

1. Create this file/etc/logrotate.d/tomcat

2. Copy the following contents into the above file
/var/log/tomcat/catalina.out { copytruncate daily rotate 7 compress missingok size 5M }

 About the above configuration:

• Make sure that the path /var/log/tomcat/catalina.out above is adjusted to point to your tomcat’s catalina.out

• daily - rotates the catalina.out daily

• rotate – keeps at most 7 log files

• compress – compressesthe rotated files

• size – rotates if the size of catalina.out is bigger than 5M

How it works

1. Every night the cron daemon runs jobs listed in the /etc/cron.daily/ directory

1. This triggers the /etc/cron.daily/logrotate file which is generally shipped with linux installations. It runs the command “/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf“

1. The /etc/logrotate.confincludes all scripts in the/etc/logrotate.d/ directory.

1. This triggers the /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat file that you wrote in the previous step.

• Run logrotate manually

Run the following command to run the cron job manually
/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf

• More logrotate options

To see all logrotate options on your system, see the manual:
man logrotate