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Comment by jonathonf | Hacker News Reader

Submitting this so I can make a feature request. :)

The -logpath option is fine, but it would be nice if it could create subdirectories too (e.g. $LOGPATH/YYYY/mm/access.log.YYYYmmdd ). Otherwise, over time the log dir is going to get unwieldy.

I'm currently running several sites in alpine+rwasa Docker containers; I'm liking having a set of entirely isolated web servers based on a 10MB container image, each apparently consuming ~6KB RAM while idle.

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Author here: Feature request noted, although the one-logfile-per-day for me doesn't seem too unwieldy. I have not seen webserver logs stored in the way you describe, is that a common practice (each month's worth in its own separate directory?)

No. Using something that truncates and rotates the log files is pretty common.

People generally use logrotate. And limit the amount they keep.

Yes - at least, from a sample size of 1 (me) I like the old cronolog way of doing this, and it means I don't get the rotate-a-day-later-to-avoid-trailing-lines-in-compressed-logfiles issue.

Depending on what you read [1] cronolog is a decent way of doing things (e.g. unlike logrotate it doesn't require a reload of web server). Without exporting to something like ELK, it also gives you a decent audit/accountancy trail. Limiting logs is not something I can really do in production (think six-years-plus of mandated data retention).

[1] https://startpage.com/do/search?q=cronolog+vs+logrotate

The generally accepted logging convention is that you work with how logrotate works (listen to appropriate signals for freeing up the file to let logrotate truncate it and so forth). If anyone needs to setup anything other than that default, it is typically better to target customizing logrotate and unify your endpoint logging there rather than to keep modifying each application's configuration. This is about separation of concerns for me as a sysadmin v. getting away from operations decisions. If your project is widely accepted you'll want to limit the amount of code you maintain on stuff that's not in your domain. Heck, it's really the Unix Way. If you were writing against Windows, I'd be using the event logger for application events with my own text based logs and let users configure what I emit to the main event logger.

An example of how people let logrotate do most of the lifting is in the Chef server codebase.

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