Configuring logrotate without root access (per user log rotation)

Question

How best can logrotate be configured, on a per-user basis, to rotate files in the home directory of the user, under control of a per-user crontab -e?

Answer 1

Try this procedure:

1. create /home/user/logrotate folder

   mkdir /home/user/logrotate
   

2. create /home/user/logrotate/my.conf configuration file with logrotate directive as you need

3. create /home/user/logrotate/cronjob to run logrotate every day at 2:30 AM (this is an example)

   30 2 * * * /usr/sbin/logrotate -s /home/user/logrotate/status /home/user/logrotate/my.conf > /dev/null 2>&1
   

4. check your configuration file syntax:

   logrotate -d /home/user/logrotate/my.conf
   

5. configure crontab to run logrotate (Warning: This removes existing entries in your crontab. Use crontab -e to manually add the line from step 3 to an existing crontab):

   crontab /home/user/logrotate/cronjob 
   

After this last command, logrotate will rotate file as described in /home/user/logrotate/my.conf and save log file status in /home/user/logrotate/status.

Use:

crontab -r   # remove crontab activities for user
crontab -l   # to list crontab activity for user
crontab -e   # edit user crontab entries

Here is logrotate and crontab man page.