Logs on your development machine can quickly grow to a silly size, especially if you have long running projects.

An easy cure for this is to set-up logrotate (newsyslog on OS X) to rotate the logs once they grow past a certain point (1MiB in the example below), after all most of the time you’ll only be interested in the last few lines of your logs…

Create a new file in /etc/newsyslog.d called dev-logs.conf with the following contents:

# logfilename [owner:group] mode count size when flags [/pid_file] [sig_num]
/Users/USER/Programming/**/log/*.log USER:staff 644 2 1024 * G

You’ll need sudo rights in order to do this (the config file should be owned by root:wheel).

Note:

  1. Replace /Users/USER/Programming with the full path to your projects folder, e.g. /Users/bob/Programming
  2. Replace the USER in USER:staff with your username, e.g. bob:staff

The globbing pattern explained:

All log files within a log directory in any of your projects within your programming folder