Re: [Fetchmail-users] logrotate options?

[Peter P. <ro...@ri...>]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 04:35:35PM -0500, Joe Acquisto-j4 wrote:
> This is fetchmail release 6.4.21+SSL-SSLv2-SSLv3+NLS
> 
> Looking for examples I can follow to implement log rotation with
> fetchmail.   Links, examples, tutorials kindly accepted.

If you have the logrotate tool installed on your system, the fetchmail
source contains a sample fetchmail.logrotate file:

  https://gitlab.com/fetchmail/fetchmail/-/blob/next/contrib/fetchmail.logrotate

Of course, you can customize it however you wish - specify different
rotation criteria, point to a different fetchmail logfile - but, most
importantly, you will most probably need to modify the command to be
executed after the logfile has been rotated - the contents of
the logrotate configuration file's "postrotate" section.
In the sample file, the command in the postrotate section is a POSIX
shell "if" statement that examines the server that it is running on and
figures out the appropriate command to run to make the fetchmail
instance that is running as a system service reopen its logfiles.

If you run fetchmail as root, something like that will probably work for
you. If you run fetchmail from a normal user account, there might be
a slight problem here, since the logrotate tool will need to restart
fetchmail. So if your fetchmail instance is run under some kind of
service manager (supervise, runsv, a systemd user service, etc), then
the postrotate section is where you place the appropriate command to
restart that particular service.

Of course, if you run fetchmail under some kind of service manager, then
there may be no need for a separate logfile at all, since most of
the service managers can already handle a program that sends messages to
its standard output stream, as fetchmail does by default in daemon mode.
So that service manager's functionality may already provide some kind of
log storage and rotation, and you don't need the logrotate tool.

Hope that helps! In short, it all depends on how you run fetchmail.

G'luck,
Peter

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Peter Pentchev  ro...@ri... ro...@de... pp...@st...
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