filereaper

Filereaper is a tool to remove files based on different and flexible policies.

It can work just as a command line executor and also as a Debian cron manager specifying configuration files easily

Note: it is still in development, there are some pending things to do like:

• implement more policies
• code documentation
• autodoc with sphinx and readthedocs
• implement missing options
• verbose mode
• use python logger

Installation

Two installation modes

• Debian package: regular installation
• Python egg: for development

Execution modes

Filereaper can work in two different ways.

• As a command line executor:

  Just executing filereaper by command line passing the corresponding parameters specifying file regexp, policies, etc.

  Example: Remove recursively files in /var/log/apache that matchs *.log keeping always a minimum of 2 files and removing the ones older than 20 days, being the files ordered by access time.

  $ filereaper --keepminimum 2 --file_match "*.log" --recurse true --time_mode atime --older_than_d 20 --exclude_list main.log,main2.log --test_mode False /var/log/apache

• As a self configured crons:

  This mode configure the Linux crontabs by specifying some configuration files. The idea is to have a configuration file per directory to clean.

  By default, you will only need to add configuration files to /etc/filereaper/conf.d/ similar to the samples provided in conf directory.

  Filereaper will configure the system crontabs to based on these configuration files, also, it has a storage layer so it remembers what is configured and the crontabs will always be in sync with the configuration files.

Parameters

• test_mode

  Security parameter activated by default that prints the files to be removed instead of removing them. This is useful while testing your configuration/command line. Once you are sure it's correct, disable this parameter and filereaper will perform the removal instead of printing them.

  Default: True (activated)

• exclude_list

  Separated comma list with the files to exclude from the removal

  Default: "" (empty)

• file_match

  Only files that match this regexp

  Default: ".*" (match everything)

• keepminimum

  Setting this parameter assures filereaper will always keep at least N minimum files. This parameter has higher priority than any policy.

  Default: 0

• recurse

  Perform the removal recursively. The policies are applied to the full list of files gathered recursively.

  Default: False

• remove_links

  If activated, filereaper removes symlinks. Only the symlink, not the file/dir were it points.

  Default: False

• time_mode

  Parameter used when ordering the files, the possible values are atime (access time), ctime (creation time), mtime (modification time)

  Default: ctime

Policies

The policies are applies in the most restrictive way, this means removing the less as possible for security reasons. Therefore if a policy says to remove A and B files and another policy says to remove A and C, only A will be removed.

• keeplast

ordering by time (atime, ctime or mtime) filereaper will remove everything but the N last specified here.

• older_than_d

ordering by time (atime, ctime or mtime) filreaper will remove the files older than N days

• older_than_m

ordering by time (atime, ctime or mtime) filreaper will remove the files older than N minutes

• older_than_s

ordering by time (atime, ctime or mtime) filreaper will remove the files older than N seconds