logrotate mit Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, zypper, chocolatey installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage

Befehle und Aliase

• logrotate

Projektgeschichte

The official README describes logrotate as a utility designed to simplify administration of systems that generate many log files. Its manpage documents the traditional cron or systemd timer execution model and the central `/etc/logrotate.conf` configuration file.

The current upstream GitHub changelog shows continuing maintenance through modern 3.x releases. Recent entries include systemd integration hardening, state-file locking, Zstandard compression support, stricter parser behavior, fixes for security-sensitive file handling, and a 2024 3.22.0 release with additional parser, rotation, and timer fixes.

Adoptionsgeschichte

logrotate is widely packaged across Unix and Unix-like systems. The supplied package metadata records packages in Alpine, Homebrew, Chocolatey, Debian, Fedora/DNF, MacPorts, Nix, Arch, Ubuntu, and openSUSE, reflecting its status as infrastructure plumbing rather than an application-specific tool.

Its adoption has been helped by the simple contract between packages and the host system: applications can install small snippets under a system's logrotate configuration directory, while logrotate centralizes schedule, retention, compression, permissions, and post-rotation hooks.

Wie es verwendet wird

Administrators define log paths and directives in `/etc/logrotate.conf` or included configuration files. logrotate can rotate hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, after elapsed minutes, or by size; it can compress old logs, create replacement files, move logs to old directories, run scripts, and maintain a state file to avoid repeated rotations.

Package maintainers care about directives such as `create`, `copytruncate`, `missingok`, `compress`, `delaycompress`, `su`, and `postrotate` because they determine whether daemons keep writing safely after logs are moved or truncated.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

logrotate is one of the small system tools that package managers quietly depend on. It lets packaged daemons ship predictable log retention behavior without each daemon inventing its own rotation code, and its config snippets are a familiar part of Linux and Unix package post-installation hygiene.

Zeitleiste

• 2016: 3.11.0 imports systemd service and timer examples and adds new configuration directives.
• 2018: 3.15.0 renames the default example to logrotate.conf and improves systemd timer behavior.
• 2020: 3.17.0 adds state-file locking; 3.18.0 adds Zstandard compression support.
• 2022: 3.20.0 addresses CVE-2022-1348 around state-file handling.
• 2024: 3.22.0 release fixes time calculations, copy/compress edge cases, named-pipe handling, parser ambiguity, and timer behavior.

Related projects

• cron and systemd timers: common schedulers for running logrotate.
• gzip, xz, zstd, and other compressors: external compression tools commonly used by logrotate configurations.
• syslog and daemon packages: common producers of logs managed by logrotate.

Quellen

• https://github.com/logrotate/logrotate
• https://github.com/logrotate/logrotate/blob/main/ChangeLog.md
• https://github.com/logrotate/logrotate/blob/main/logrotate.8.in
• source_facts.package-manager