Rotate HAProxy logs hourly

Rational

On production systems HAProxy might be generating a very large amount of logs. It is possible that those logs can become a huge problem unless you rotate them. Daily rotation might be good for low traffic installations, but high trafic ones might generate almost 10gb in a few hours , so you might need to rotate logs every hour. Rotating logs hourly is not configured by default on Ubuntu systems. You need to do a bit just more than you think.

Let’s start

Configure log rotation for haproxy by placing an haproxy conf file under /etc/logrptate.d/ . All that as long as you have enabled logs for HAProxy in general.

/var/log/haproxy.log {
    hourly # Rotate every hour
    rotate 0 # keep no logs
    missingok
    notifempty
    postrotate
        invoke-rc.d rsyslog rotate >/dev/null 2>&1 || true
    endscript
}

Now for the missing part. By default there is no hourly cronjob for logrotation. So you may configure hourly logrotation, as above, but no logrotation will actually happen. To enable it just copy the daily logrotate cronjob file to the hourly directory.

cp /etc/cron.daily/logrotate /etc/cron.hourly/logrotate

Now restart cron and you are good to go.

Fin