Ruby on rails log file size too large

Question

I stumbled to learn that my rails3.1 log file is super large, around 21mb. Is this, in terms of size normal? What the log file would like in the production environment? Besides,

Answer 1

The log folder of your Rails application holds three log files corresponding to each of the standard environments. Log files can grow very large over time. A rake task is provided to allow the easy clearing of the log files.

rake log:clear
# Truncates all *.log files in log/ to zero bytes 
# Specify which logs with LOGS=test,development,production

Answer 2

Yes, You can using syntax like this:

config.logger = ActiveSupport::Logger.new(config.log_file, num_of_file_to_keep, num_of_MB*1024*1024)

Example:

config.logger = ActiveSupport::Logger.new(config.log_file, 2, 20*1024*1024)

It not only using for Rails log, you can using log file of any services run with rails, such as: rpush log, ...

Answer 3

According to the documentation, if you want to limit the size of the log folder, put this in your 'development.rb'-file:

config.logger = ActiveSupport::Logger.new(config.paths['log'].first, 1, 50 * 1024 * 1024)

With this, your log files will never grow bigger than 50Mb. You can change the size to your own preference. The ‘1’ in the second parameter means that 1 historic log file will be kept, so you’ll have up to 100Mb of logs – the current log and the previous chunk of 50Mb.

Answer 4

I automatically clear the logs in development on each server start with config/initializers/clear_development_log.rb:

if Rails.env.development?
  `rake log:clear`
end

Answer 5

You may want to use logrotate. Have a look at the answer to this question: Ruby on Rails production log rotation.

Answer 6

If you don't like waiting for rake log:clear to load its environment and only want to clear one log on the fly, you can do the following:

cat /dev/null > log/mylog.log # Or whatever your log's name is

(This allows the log to stay online while the app is running, whereas rm log/mylog.log would require restarting the app.)