I don't think Postfix comes with a log rotate by default, and I noticed on all my servers the file size had grown considerably large (+5GB), so I added it to Logrotate. If you're not familiar, it's really easy to use and easy to setup a new file to be rotated.
Create/edit the file:
nano /etc/logrotate.d/postfix
Add your config:
/var/log/postfix.log {
weekly
missingok
rotate 3
compress
delaycompress
notifempty
copytruncate
create 0640 root root
}
And that's it, now postfix.log will get rotated weekly. If you need to adjust to your liking, here's each value explained:
weekly: Rotate the log file once a week.
missingok: If the log file isn’t found, don’t show an error, just move on.
rotate 3: Keep three old log files before deleting the oldest one.
compress: Compress the rotated log files to save space.
delaycompress: Wait one rotation cycle before compressing, so the most recent backup stays uncompressed.
notifempty: Only rotate the log if it’s not empty.
copytruncate: Copies the file content to a backup and then clears the file.
create 0640 root root: After rotating, create a new empty log file with permissions set to 0640 and ownership set to root:root.
Logrotate for Ubuntu 22: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jammy/man8/logrotate.8.html
Logrotate for Ubuntu 24: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/noble/man8/logrotate.8.html
Anyone find any other files that grow out of control and could use a rotate?
