Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

🚯 Prevent development logs from bloating on macOS

I rarely need to refer to development.log or test.log when working on rails applications, but yet I end up keeping weeks or even years of records [gigabytes]. I'm used to working with logrotate, and I wanted to find a similar solution that was preinstalled with macOS. macOS comes preinstalled with a program called newsyslog that can keep file sizes in check. I just created a new file at /etc/newsyslog.d/rails.conf which limits all rail's log files to just 10MB

# /etc/newsyslog.d/rails.conf
# logfilename                       	                        [owner:group]      mode count size(KB)     when  flags [/pid_file] [sig_num]
/Users/<username>/dev/<rails projects>/*/log/*.log     		    <username>:staff   644  0     10000  		*     G
# Mono repos
/Users/<username>/dev/<rails projects>/*/*/log/*.log     	    <username>:staff   644  0     10000  		*     G
# Deeper mono repos
/Users/<username>/dev/<rails projects>/*/*/*/log/*.log          <username>:staff   644  0     10000  		*     G

You can also perform a dryrun of the config for testing:

sudo newsyslog -v -n -f /etc/newsyslog.d/rails.conf
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