Logfile rotation

[rumpelsepp (Stefan Tatschner)]

Heyou,

just a simple question. What’s the current best practice for logfile rotation? I start syncthing on FreeBSD with -logfile /var/log/syncthing.log. I have a newsyslog.conf line, which rotates that file daily:

/var/log/syncthing.log	syncthing:syncthing	644	7	*	@T00	XC	/var/run/syncthing.pid

“Problem” is that newsyslog sends SIGHUP to syncthing which restarts syncthing. I think it is not needed to restart syncthing completely when the logfile-filedescriptor changes. What’s the cleanest way to do this? Why don’t we have a SIGHUP handler that reloads the logfile, and, for instance a SIGUSR1 handler which restarts syncthing instead?

Thanks!

[wweich]

I think this is in the current stable version, so there should be no need to signal the rotation to Syncthing.

Enable log rotation by automatically closing log file (fixes #2251)

[rumpelsepp (Stefan Tatschner)]

I feel that this might cause dropped log messages? Are they buffered when the logfile has not been reopened yet?

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

No, it’s open()ed from within write() when necessary.

However as you’re running it as a service of some kind you might want to just integrate it with syslog instead anyway. I usually end up with something similar to syncthing -no-restart -logflags 0 | logger -t syncthing and then routing the messages appropriately in your syslog config.