In Postgres, set log_rotation_size but my logs are still not rotating

I’m using Postgres 9.5 on Ubuntu 14.04. I wanted to rotate my logs whenever they reach a certain size. So I edited /etc/postgresql/9.5/main/postgresql.conf and set this

log_rotation_size = 50MB                # Automatic rotation of logfiles will
                                        # happen after that much log output.
                                        # 0 disables.

Then I restarted my server

sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql restart

However after running some operations, I ran out of disk space, and discovered my log had not rotated at all …

myuser@mymachine:~$ ls -al /var/log/postgresql/postgresql-9.5-main.log
-rw-r----- 1 postgres postgres 3165773943 Dec 29 18:34 /var/log/postgresql/postgresql-9.5-main.log

What else do I need to do to get the log rotation to kick in?

In Debian/Ubuntu, per policy it's the logrotate package that is in charge of handling log rotation and purge for all services, PostgreSQL included.

From https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-files.html :


Log files must be rotated occasionally so that they don't grow
indefinitely. The best way to do this is to install a log rotation
configuration file in the directory /etc/logrotate.d, normally named
/etc/logrotate.d/package, and use the facilities provided by
logrotate.

So there is a /etc/logrotate.d/postgresql-common configuration file that can be tuned to rotate log files when they grow over a size given by the size keyword , among a lot of other options.

On the other hand, should you want to use the PostgreSQL feature to achieve this, as opposed to the pre-configured method of the OS, you need to consider all logging parameters in postgresql.conf, not just log_rotation_size. First a Debian/Ubuntu packaged PostgreSQL will turn off logging_collector to not interfere with logrotate, but most of log_* options depend on it to be effective, as mentioned in the doc, for instance:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/runtime-config-logging.html


log_rotation_size (integer)


When logging_collector is enabled, this parameter determines the maximum size of an individual log file. After this many kilobytes have
been emitted into a log file, a new log file will be created. Set to
zero to disable size-based creation of new log files. This parameter
can only be set in the postgresql.conf file or on the server command
line.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#159528, answer score: 6