Docker container logs taking all my disk space

Question

I am running a container on a VM. My container is writing logs by default to /var/lib/docker/containers/CONTAINER_ID/CONTAINER_ID-json.log file until the disk is full.

Currently, I have to delete manually this file to avoid the disk to be full. I read that in Docker 1.8 there will be a parameter to rotate the logs. What would you recommend as the current workaround?

Answer 1

Docker 1.8 has been released with a log rotation option. Adding:

--log-opt max-size=50m 

when the container is launched does the trick. You can learn more at: https://docs.docker.com/engine/admin/logging/overview/

Answer 2

CAUTION: This is for docker-compose version 2 only

Example:

version: '2'
services:
  db:
    container_name: db
    image: mysql:5.7
    ports:
      - 3306:3306
    logging:
      options:
        max-size: 50m

Answer 3

Caution: this post relates to docker versions < 1.8 (which don't have the --log-opt option)

Why don't you use logrotate (which also supports compression)?

/var/lib/docker/containers/*/*-json.log {
hourly
rotate 48
compress
dateext
copytruncate
}

Configure it either directly on your CoreOs Node or deploy a container (e.g. https://github.com/tutumcloud/logrotate) which mounts /var/lib/docker to rotate the logs.

Answer 4

Pass log options while running a container. An example will be as follows

sudo docker run -ti --name visruth-cv-container  --log-opt max-size=5m --log-opt max-file=10 ubuntu /bin/bash

where --log-opt max-size=5m specifies the maximum log file size to be 5MB and --log-opt max-file=10 specifies the maximum number of files for rotation.