How to understand why logrotate didn't work by itself? Do I need to restart cron service in Ubuntu?

Question

ubuntu

In order for logrotate to run every hour, I moved its script from the daily cron folder to hourly - but the nginx log is still swollen to several gigs (there is a rotation config). I manually launched in the console logrotate /etc/logrotate.confand only then did the rotation take place. Ubuntu 20.04

How to understand why logrotate didn't work by itself?

#!/bin/sh

# skip in favour of systemd timer
if [ -d /run/systemd/system ]; then
    exit 0
fi

# this cronjob persists removals (but not purges)
if [ ! -x /usr/sbin/logrotate ]; then
    exit 0
fi

/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf
EXITVALUE=$?
if [ $EXITVALUE != 0 ]; then
    /usr/bin/logger -t logrotate "ALERT exited abnormally with [$EXITVALUE]"
fi
exit $EXITVALUE

Answer 1

# skip in favour of systemd timer
if [ -d /run/systemd/system ]; then
    exit 0
fi

It is run through systemd, not cron.

# systemctl status logrotate.timer
● logrotate.timer - Daily rotation of log files
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/logrotate.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (waiting) since Sat 2020-10-17 03:30:01 MSK; 2 months 24 days ago
    Trigger: Mon 2021-01-11 00:00:00 MSK; 17h left
   Triggers: ● logrotate.service
       Docs: man:logrotate(8)
             man:logrotate.conf(5)

# cat /lib/systemd/system/logrotate.timer
[Unit]
Description=Daily rotation of log files
Documentation=man:logrotate(8) man:logrotate.conf(5)

[Timer]
OnCalendar=daily
AccuracySec=12h
Persistent=true

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target