Automatically Rotate your Log Files in Development

I’m trying to save hard drive space, since I’ve got this super small (and fast?) SSD hard drive on the way. I noticed that I was using a TON of space to store totally worthless logs for my Rails apps. Now, I know I could set up proper log rotation, but I don’t feel like going through the trouble for my local machine.

Here’s a quick tip I picked up here that will set your logs to automatically rotate in the test and development environments. Just add the following line to these files:

• config/development.rb
• config/test.rb

config.logger = Logger.new(config.log_path, 2, 20.megabytes)

Make sure you’ve got these in your .gitignore file as well:

/log/*
*.log

That will keep your log files under control, but with plenty of room for digging in if need be.