'logger rotate' and logrotate

Asterisk logs files (typically under /var/log/asterisk) need some attention because they can get quite large.

You can do "logger rotate" from the asterisk command line or

  /usr/sbin/asterisk -rx 'logger rotate'  

from a bash prompt .. and you can add it to a cron job so it does it automatically for you.

logrotate

If however you have a system that uses the logrotate utility, you can get it to rotate without making a special script and you can still have good control over what the system does with your logs.

Here is a sample from /etc/logrotate.d/asterisk on my system

/var/log/asterisk/messages /var/log/asterisk/*log {
   missingok
   rotate 5
   weekly
   create 0640 asterisk asterisk
   postrotate
       /usr/sbin/asterisk -rx 'logger reload' > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
   endscript
}

This setup will rotate the files weekly cycling them 5 times so for example, messages will be the newest log file, followed by messages.1, messages.2 all the way to messages.5 (the oldest). If you are not running asterisk as user:group asterisk:asterisk, you can eleminate the create 0640 asterisk asterisk line.

If you're just keeping cdr records in csv files and you're just using them to check against VOIP providers charges (so accuracy isn't a big concern) you can use this logrotate script to rotate them once a month

/var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv/*csv {
  missingok
  rotate 5
  monthly
  create 0640 asterisk asterisk
}

logrotate for Debian

You'd still need to command asterisk 'logger reload' just after moving the log file, or otherwise it will continue to write to the old file.

The current default Debian /etc/logrotate.d/asterisk is:

 /var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv/Master.csv /var/log/asterisk/debug /var/log/asterisk/event_log /var/log/asterisk/messages {
       weekly
       missingok
       rotate 4
       sharedscripts
       postrotate
               /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d asterisk logger-reload
       endscript
 }

See also

• Asterisk CDR csv handling2
• Asterisk administration

---

Go back to Asterisk