logrotate doesn't rotate catalina.out

This is an old case, I see that, but I felt I should add my solution as it does rotate the logs, which was the original question.

In my case, I set up the /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat file in more or less the same manner as Justin did in the initial question:

/<apache-location>/tomcat/logs/catalina.out {
  daily    
  copytruncate
  rotate 180
  compress
  missingok
  maxsize 200M
}

(my apache location is weird, so substitute as appropriate. The rotate 180 keeps my logs for about 30 days, if my math isn't too far off (24h * 30 days = 720h --> if rotating every 4 hours, that yields 720 / 4 = 180 times --> keep 180 log files).)

but I trigger the execution from a normal cronjob, as such:

0 */4 * * * /usr/sbin/logrotate -vf /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat >> /var/log/cut.log 2>&1

To rotate daily, just adjust the first part of the cronjob to e.g. 0 0 * * * (midnight every day).

The -vf options are to turn on verbose (for logging the cron) and to force the execution of the rotation. The /var/log/cut.log is a file I've added specifically for logging of the cron job. The >> /var/log/cut.log 2>&1 could of course be dropped.

I'm running the rotation/cron job as root user.

This seems to work on my systems, after having had a lot of trouble initially. Not sure that this is the ideal solution, but at least I've avoided that the catalina.out grows into the heavens and above, which was my main goal, and I suspect also the goal with the original question...