Log rotation/clearing in Ruby on Rails

Question

How can I setup the automatic cleanup on test.log and development.log in ruby on rails?

Is there a setting to automatically delete dev and test logs on server start and tests run?

Answer 1

The ruby logger is on hand to help you out here - and it has default options for rotation.

Here's what I do:

In environment.rb we define our own logger

new_logger = Logger.new(File.join(RAILS_ROOT, "log", "new_logger_#{RAILS_ENV}.log"), 'daily')
new_logger.formatter = Logger::Formatter.new

This creates our own loggers... with a formatter (so you get timestamps etc), with one per environment, and rotated daily.

Then in the initialization block we ask Rails to use this logger

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

  config.active_record.logger = new_logger
  config.action_controller.logger = new_logger

  #snip
end

You can obviously see the power here too to have different loggers for active_record and for action_controller - sometimes very useful!

Answer 2

rake log:clear is a rake task that truncates all files that match log/*.log to zero bytes. You could call it in your server start and run tests tasks.

Answer 3

All script/server is, is a ruby script, im sure you could modify it to do something like:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'fileutils'
FileUtils.rm File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), log, *.log)
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../config/boot'
require 'commands/server'