LazyRotator

Tie log (or other file) rotation to the (un-scheduled?) execution of code. The raison d'étre for this gem is that I'm too lazy to clear out test and development logs manually and am too anal-retentive to be happy with large log files accumulating in my various project directories.

On those rare occasions when I do want to look at a log file in my development environment, I don't want to waste time skipping past megabytes of older log entries. On the other hand, I might have restarted my app server or run tests (maybe a different set) again before deciding to look at the logs, so I don't want to simply truncate the log files on each run - keeping a few very recent files around seems to be a useful compromise.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'lazy_rotator', group: %i(development test)

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install lazy_rotator

Usage

For a Rails app, add the following to config/application.rb:

if Kernel.const_defined?(:LazyRotator) && (Rails.env.test? || Rails.env.development?)
  log_file = File.expand_path("../log/#{Rails.env}.log", __dir__)
  LazyRotator.rotate log_file
end

Note: you will probably need to update your .gitignore file to match /log/*.log* - that trailing * will make sure the rotated log files are ignored.

Set the number of copies to keep (the default is 5):

LazyRotator.rotate 'path/to/log', 20

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome.