apachelogrotate

Problem: When doing a graceful restart of the apache server for log rotation, how long do you wait for the old processes to release thier filehandles on the old logfiles before you start compressing the logs?

Solution: I have scripted the log rotation script to check the filehandles of the old logfile using the UNIX utility lsof. You can set $maxtries to however many attempts you want to check the file and $sleeptime to how long you want to wait between retries. The default is 10 seconds between tries, with a maximum of 6 tries (60 seconds, because HTTP is less persistent than other protocols).

NOTES: This script is designed to be run from cron at 23:59 at night. Here is my cron entry:

# rotate/archive the web logs
# ATonns Sat Mar 31 22:46:49 EST 2001
59 23 * * * /usr/local/sbin/apachelogrotate.pl

It will get all the information about the current day/time and then sleep for 60 seconds as to attempt to rotate the logs as close to midnight as possible. A step-by-step breakdown of the procedure is:

• read internal configs
• wait for midnight
• read the config file
• sanity check configs
• do the rotations (rename old, restart server)
• check diskspace on destination
• check file handles on old logfile
• gzip old file to alternate locations
• build report and email it

Tweaks:

1. You MUST change who the reports are mailed to by editing the "@victims_email" and "@victims_pagers" variables.
   
   
2. Reports are mailed using "/usr/bin/mail" with the -s option to set the subject. You might need to change this under Solaris or any other SysV OS to "mailx" the BSD mailer. Just edit the "$MAIL" variable.
   
   
3. I like to name my logfiles "access" and "errors". If you need something else, change the array "@logtype"
   
   

Here is the perl source to apachelogrotate.pl.
Here is a sample config file, apachelogrotate.cfg.
Here is the GPL, which is the license for 'apachelogrotate.pl'

P.S. - I'm sure this script could use a lot of improvement. I'm leaving it as an excercise to the reader (ie: don't email me about how this isn't right or that isn't what you wanted - get off your a$$ and do it yourself). The script has a LONG history and could use an overhaul, which I'll do one of these days.