Chovy’s Blog

I’ve often wanted to look back at chat logs. Below are a few simple steps you can take to enable logging in IRSSI and add the log files to the logrotate daemon.

Make irssi log all chat windows:

# Create the directory
$ sudo mkdir /var/log/irclogs
$ sudo chown username:users /var/log/irclogs

#in IRSSI window
/SET autolog ON
/SET autolog_path /var/log/irclogs/$tag/$0.log
/save #answer 'yes'

#verify chats are logged (grouped by hostname)
$ ls /var/log/irclogs
freenode

Tell logrotate to auto-rotate them:

$ sudo vi /etc/logrotate.d/irssi

#paste into editor
/var/log/irclogs/*/*.log {
  copytruncate
  compress
  notifempty
  missingok
}

Test that log rotation works for a channel (ie: #xml on freenode):

$ sudo /usr/sbin/logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf
$ sudo /usr/sbin/logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf
$ cd /var/log/irclogs
$ ls -R
./freenode:
#xml.log  #xml.log.1.gz

I learned a few new commands that I haven’t used before:

To find a list of possible locations for a given application (in this case I choose “apt” which isn’t really a binary by itself, but rather a directory name used by “apt-get”.

$ whereis apt
apt: /etc/apt /usr/lib/apt /usr/share/apt /usr/share/man/man8/apt.8.gz

$ whereis apt-get
apt-get: /usr/bin/apt-get /usr/X11R6/bin/apt-get /usr/bin/X11/apt-get /usr/share/man/man8/apt-get.8.gz

Very cool for finding things quickly. If you didn't catch what the output is, it is a simple space-delimited list of matches following the application name.