What’s the best strategy for log rotation with apache+passenger+ruby-on-rails+thesql

apache-2.2loggingphusion-passengerruby-on-rails

(Hope I have the right SE site for this question, apologies if not.)

I have a Ruby-on-Rails application that is deployed using Apache+mod_rails (passenger). It uses MySQL for the database backend. I'm using SyslogLogger to send the RoR log to syslog and using logrotate via a daily cron job to rotate the logs.

What I've found is that the RoR app hangs if it is in the middle of something when the logs are rotated. I've tried putting copytruncate in the logrotate configuration, but it appears that this also affects the apache logs (maybe because the RoR error logs go to the error.log file of apache) and – possibly – also the MySQL logs (maybe – it's sometimes hard to correlate exactly which log causes the crash).

Searching on the internet turns up some different solutions on log rotation, one is to use the copytruncate key, another is to use cronolog, but I've yet to find one that directly addresses the issue I'm seeing.

So is there a known solution for this? What is the "right way" to rotate logs on a RoR application (using apache and mod_rails for deployment)? Should I just put copytruncate in every logrotate configuration file that is vaguely related with the application?

Best Answer

Instead of 'copytruncate', these lines worked for me in the logrotate file for my rails app:

  postrotate
    touch /your-rails-directory/tmp/restart.txt
  endscript

Related Solutions

Windows – How to rotate apache logs on windows without interrupting service

As a workaround, you may be able to switch to use a single log for all virtual hosts and post-process them using split-logfile or something similar (to get them into individual logs per virtual host). This is recommended in Apache's docs here. Not sure if it's an option in your environment.

How to set up Apache with Passenger (mod_rails) on Mac OS X

I was recently awarded the popular question badge for this question, so I thought it was about time I posted the answer. I'll just post the relevant parts of my conf files.

So in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf I have the following:

LoadModule passenger_module /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.7/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.7
PassengerRuby /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby

Also make sure to uncomment the following line:

Include /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Then in /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf I have the following:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName example.dyndns.org
   DocumentRoot "/Users/Shared/rails/project/public"
   <Directory /Users/Shared/rails/project/public>
      AllowOverride all
      Options -MultiViews
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from all
   </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

After today I will not have access to this server. We don't use it anymore. Instead we use Heroku. So if it's not working for you, for some reason, or I've forgot some vital part of the configuration, I will not be able to help you. It may be outdated and I don't know if it works with newer versions of passenger. Also the server was using Mac OS X Snow Leopard, so it may not work with other versions of OS X. However, my guess is that it hasn't changed all that much and that most of this is still valid.

I also want another disclaimer. This may not be the safest configuration. I don't understand all the options, but it seems to be very allowing. I had a colleague help me with the configuration and this is simply the first version of the configuration that we got working. We did not care much about the security since it was only a dev server and not production.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the configuration, please feel free to post those. Even though I will not have any use for those, others still might. After all, this is a popular question.

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