The logrotate tool is installed by default, but I will include the installation instructions here for completeness. This recipe will show you how to rotate logs for rsyslog. We will rotate the logs everyday, add an extension based on the date, compress them with a one-day delay, and keep them for 365 days. Perform the following steps:

The logrotate tool is a script that is launched by cron everyday.

The directives added to the default logrotate definition are compress, daily, delaycompress, dateext, missingok, and rotate.

The compress directive compresses old versions of the log files with gzip. This behavior is somewhat changed by specifying delaycompress. This causes us to always have the most recently rotated log file available uncompressed.

The daily directive makes logrotate execute the definition every day. The rotate directive only keeps x rotated log files before deleting the oldest. In this case, we have specified this to be 365, which means that while rotating daily, the logs are kept for 365 days.

The missingok directive makes it alright for syslog to not create a file, which, however unlikely, is possible.

The dateext directive appends a date to the rotated file in the form of yyyymmdd instead of a number, which is the default.

The /etc/logrotate.conf file contains the defaults directives for all definitions. If you don't specifically use a directive within a definition for a file, the values in this file will be used if specified.

It would make sense to change the settings in this file so that all the definitions are affected, but this is not practical; not all log files are made equal. The syslog service generates a lot of messages, and it would probably clutter up your system before long. However, yum, for instance, doesn't generate a lot of messages, and it keeps this log file readable for much longer than your syslog files. This, by the way, is reflected in the definition for yum.

If you want to debug your new configuration, this can be achieved by executing the following to test just one configuration:

~# /usr/sbin/logrotate -v /etc/logrotate.d/<config file>

Alternatively, you can use the following to test everything:

~]# /usr/sbin/logrotate -v /etc/logrotate.conf

Here's an example:

~]# /usr/sbin/logrotate -v /etc/logrotate.d/syslog
reading config file /etc/logrotate.d/syslog

Handling 1 logs

rotating pattern: /var/log/cron
/var/log/maillog
/var/log/messages
/var/log/secure
/var/log/spooler
 1048576 bytes (no old logs will be kept)
empty log files are rotated, old logs are removed
considering log /var/log/cron
  log does not need rotating
considering log /var/log/maillog
  log does not need rotating
considering log /var/log/messages
  log does not need rotating
considering log /var/log/secure
  log does not need rotating
considering log /var/log/spooler
  log does not need rotating
not running postrotate script, since no logs were rotated
~]#

Take a look at the man page of logrotate (8) for more information on configuring logrotate.