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Clear systemd journal logs

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  • Clear systemd journal logs

    On any server, the logs can start to add up and take considerable amount of disk space. Systemd conveniently stores these in /var/log/journal and has a systemctl command to help clear them.

    Take this example:

    Code:
    $ du -hs /var/log/journal/
    4.1G /var/log/journal/

    4.1GB worth of journal files, with the oldest dating back over 2 months.

    Code:
    $ ls -lath /var/log/journal/*/ | tail -n 2
    -rw-r-x---+ 1 root systemd-journal 8.0M Dec 24 05:15 user-xxx.journal

    On this server, I really don’t need that many logs, so let’s clean them out.
    There are generally 2 ways to do this.



    Clear systemd journals older than X days


    The first one is time-based, clearing everything older than say 10 days.

    Code:
    $ journalctl --vacuum-time=10d
    ...
    
    Vacuuming done, freed 2.3G of archived journals on disk.

    Alternatively, you can limit its total size.


    Clear systemd journals if they exceed X storage

    This example will keep 2GB worth of logs, clearing everything that exceeds this.

    Code:
    $ journalctl --vacuum-size=2G
    ...
    
    Vacuuming done, freed 720.0M of archived journals on disk.

    Afterwards, your /var/log/journal should be much smaller.

    Code:
    $ du -hs /var/log/journal
    1.1G /var/log/journal

    Saves you some GBs on disk!

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