Question 1

How do I set up Timberjack to rotate logs daily at midnight?

Accepted Answer

Configure RotateAt with ["00:00"] and set LocalTime for your timezone if needed. Also, ensure to call logger.Close() on exit to manage background goroutines, as shown in the example for scheduled rotation.

Question 2

What's the difference between Timberjack and lumberjack?

Accepted Answer

Timberjack is a fork of lumberjack that adds time-based rotation, clock-scheduled rotation, and opt-in gzip/zstd compression. It offers more flexibility but has a more complex configuration and deprecates the old Compress field.

Question 3

Can Timberjack handle log rotation in a Docker container?

Accepted Answer

It can if logs are written to files within the container, but it's not ideal for stdout logging common in Docker. Timberjack requires file persistence and careful cleanup with logger.Close() to avoid resource leaks in ephemeral environments.

Question 4

Which compression is better for Timberjack: gzip or zstd?

Accepted Answer

Zstd typically provides better compression ratios and speed, but gzip is more universally supported. Choose based on your storage and compatibility needs; both are set via the Compression field, with zstd being the preferred option.

Question 5

How to manually rotate logs with Timberjack on a SIGHUP signal?

Accepted Answer

Set up a signal handler to call logger.RotateWithReason("reload") on SIGHUP, as illustrated in the README example. This tags backups with a custom reason and ensures rotation without relying on time or size triggers.

Question 6

Does Timberjack automatically delete old log files?

Accepted Answer

Yes, during rotation cleanup, it deletes backups exceeding MaxBackups count or older than MaxAge days, and compresses uncompressed ones if compression is enabled, as described in the Cleanup section.

Question 7

What happens if I configure an invalid BackupTimeFormat in Timberjack?

Accepted Answer

Timberjack logs a warning to os.Stderr and falls back to the default format (2006-01-02T15-04-05.000), so rotation still works but filenames may not match expectations, requiring careful validation of the format string.

timberjack

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