This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Guy Naor. Original Post: Rotating the Rails logs with FastCGI Feed Title: Famundo - The Dev Blog Feed URL: http://devblog.famundo.com/xml/rss/feed.xml Feed Description: A blog describing the development and related technologies involved in creating famundo.com - a family management sytem written using Ruby On Rails and postgres Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Guy Naor Latest Posts From Famundo - The Dev Blog

Deploying a rails app will eventually lead to the need to manage the rails log files. They get pretty big fast, and if the log level also include the SQL queries, they grow EXTREMLY fast.

Though there is some information about it in the Rails Wiki, it's missing restarting the FastCGI processes. If you are using dynamicaly launched FastCGI processes from lighty or apache, the web server log rotation will restart the FastCGI processes and you will be covered. But if you are using FastCGI processes you launch (using spinner/spawner or a similar solution) the log file will be rotated, but the newly created log file won't be used by the ruby app until it is restarted.

Here is my logrotate configuration:

# Assume the the rails app is installed to /app/my_blog/current
# And that the user we running the app with is called rails
/app/my_blog/current/log/*.log {
  daily
  missingok
  rotate 7
  compress
  delaycompress
  notifempty
  create 0660 rails rails
  postrotate
     /app/my_blog/current/script/process/reaper -a graceful -d /app/my_blog/current/public/dispatch.fcgi 1>/dev/null 2>&1 || true
  endscript
}

The main change from the rails wiki version is the postrotate call that causes the fastCGI processes to restart and reopen the log file.