make logrotation active by default

[zeus86]

This may sound like a low hanging fruit, but can be a hassle when forgotten.

the NC-internal Logrotation shall be enabled by default.

You can easily check this for your instance with
/var/www/nc# sudo -u www-data php occ log:owncloud
while in your installation folder. The ourput is then something like

Log backend ownCloud: enabled
Log file: /var/www/nc/data/nextcloud.log
Rotate at: 10 MB

...or - most likely when not changed - the rotation is disabled. You can e.g. enable this feature with
/var/www/nc# sudo -u www-data php occ log:file --rotate-size 10MB
in your instance root folder.
This is an often missed point during the setup on an installation, and you really want to have senseful defaults. Leaving the Logrotation disabled will cause problems most like after a few month. Enabling this by default should be not a problem at all. In addition to this you might want to have a more precise control that you might want to keep more than one rotated logfile if enabled.

[patschi]

I would find this change useful as well.

To see current logging settings in NC12:

# sudo -u www-data php occ log:file
Log backend file: enabled
Log file: /var/cloud/data/nextcloud.log
Rotate at: disabled

To enable logrotation at 50 MB on NC12:

# sudo -u www-data php occ log:file --rotate-size=50M
Log backend file: enabled
Log file: /var/cloud/data/nextcloud.log
Rotate at: 50 MB

For advanced handling of Nextcloud logfiles the logrotate-daemon may be used, this is mostly pre-installed on many Linux distributions anyway.

[zeus86]

For advanced handling of Nextcloud logfiles the logrotate-daemon may be used, this is mostly pre-installed on many Linux distributions anyway.

yeah, thats true, but it has to be configured manually anyways, because it is inside the webroot folder and not within /var/log or something like that. I agree, that old-fashioned logrotate would be the better choice in general, but if NC has its own routines for that, why not use them? but at least it should be enabled by default

[patschi]

Usually logrotate does have an own configuration folder /etc/logrotate.d/, where you can create config files and point to any log files which should be rotated. So you could (1) point to your log file, /var/www/nc/data/nextcloud.log in your case, to rotate that file more precise as you want, or (2) even move the nextcloud log file to somewhere else using logfile-setting in the config file.

Anyway, yes, in my opinion there should be any default value aswell to prevent any massive increase in space consumption when high logging activity on bigger setups occurs.

[zeus86]

yes, i know of course, but that is not the point i'm trying to make. As you also noted there should be an active logrotation by default, because
a) for a webapp nextcloud writes rather huge logs and
b) to just not run into this problem

[rullzer]

done in #9137

[zeus86]

@rullzer cool, thank you. say, will this change lead to the activation of logrotate on installations in default-state when updating? or do old installations require manual intervention to make the rotation active?