Lighttpd

I don't know anything about how newsyslog functions, but that certainly sounds like normal and expected behavior to me. A program light lighttpd will open a log file when it starts and not close it until it quits. If you rename the log file, the software will of course continue writing to it under its new name, and will not attempt to write to a new file of the old name until it starts again.

Perhaps newsyslog is sending a signal to lighttpd to tell it to close and reopen its logfile, and lighttpd is not doing so? Or perhaps newsyslog needs to first be configured to send such a signal?

-- lighttpd-2005

first, apache2 has no problem writing on a rotated log, so I don't think this is normal behavior. Assume file is named "my.log". All newsyslog does is rename "my.log.1" to "my.log.2", "my.log.0" to "my.log.1", and "my.log" to "my.log.0". Then it creates a new, empty "my.log" file. I would expect lighttpd to continue logging on the newly created 777 permission log file.

I don't think there is any "signals" involved.

newsyslog is used by FreeBSD to rotate several potential large files. I have configured this generic utility to rotate the httpd logs every week.

-- lightty

According to this page:

http://www.freebsddiary.org/rotatelogs.php#newsyslog

newsyslog lets you specify a file containing the process ID of the process, and will by default send a SIGHUP to the process to tell it to start over with new log files, though you can specify an alternate signal number. I do not know if lighttpd responds to any signal number, nor if you can tell lighttpd to write its PID into a file at startup time.

-- lighttpd-2005

okay, thanks, I didn't know that.

However, the fact remains that Apache does response to the SIGHUP, and I think lightty should have the same behavior regarding rotating log files.

Can this ticket be used to add this capability?

-- lightty

A Google search for "lighttpd sighup" shows that, according to the documentation, this capability already exists:

http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/wiki/MigratingFromApache

"logrotate will send lighttpd a SIGHUP when it is time to rotate the logs and lighttpd will reopen the logs accordingly."

I have not yet tried to rotate lighttpd's logs, though I intend to try cronolog for that purpose, as it has served me well with Apache.

And to follow up on my earlier post, yes, you can have lighttpd write its pid to a file by setting the server.pid-file directive in the configuration file.

-- lighttpd-2005

???

Sorry for the hassle, it works probably fine, I had turned off the logging :-)
Please close the ticket.

-- danger