I rarely need to refer to development.log or test.log when working on rails applications, but yet I end up keeping weeks or even years of records [gigabytes]. I’m used to working with logrotate, and I wanted to find a similar solution that was preinstalled with macOS. macOS comes preinstalled with a program called newsyslog that can keep file sizes in check. I just created a new file at /etc/newsyslog.d/rails.conf which limits all rail’s log files to just 10MB
# /etc/newsyslog.d/rails.conf
# logfilename [owner:group] mode count size(KB) when flags [/pid_file] [sig_num]
/Users/<username>/dev/<rails projects>/*/log/*.log <username>:staff 644 0 10000 * G
# Mono repos
/Users/<username>/dev/<rails projects>/*/*/log/*.log <username>:staff 644 0 10000 * G
# Deeper mono repos
/Users/<username>/dev/<rails projects>/*/*/*/log/*.log <username>:staff 644 0 10000 * G
You can also perform a dryrun of the config for testing:
sudo newsyslog -v -n -f /etc/newsyslog.d/rails.conf