While working with logrotate, it’s usually pretty hard to debug while we want to write it in a short period of time.

Here are some basic info of logrotate, as well as crontab, which invokes logrotate regularly in Ubuntu 14.04.

Test logrotate manually

Directory of logrotate config file, for defining target service’s log rotation: 

/etc/logrotate.d

To test with logrotate manually, you can run 

logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.d/nginx

To check for last run on logrotate, you can run 

cat /var/lib/logrotate/status

Test logrotate with crontab

Logrotate allowing the service to run in hourly, daily, weekly or even monthly manner, which is corporated with crontab. The specific time is defined in /etc/crontab.

$ cat /etc/crontab

57 * * * * root cd / && run-parts —report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6 * * * root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts —report /etc/cron.daily )
47 6 * * 7 root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts —report /etc/cron.weekly )
52 6 1 * * root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts —report /etc/cron.monthly )

For allowing logrotate run in hourly manner, you need to put the logrotate script in /etc/cron.hourly 

mv /etc/cron.daily/logrotate /etc/cron.hourly/logrotate

References

Digital Ocean: How To Manage Log Files With Logrotate On Ubuntu 12.10