Tag Archives: tail

Sinatra-Tailer: a small app for viewing server log files

UPDATE (Jan 9, 2015): I have not updated this project in year. While it may work, I doubt it. If you would like to take over the project, leave me a comment and we’ll get in touch.

I was reading Jason Seifer’s: Offline Gem Server Rdocs, which is an apache/passenger served Sinatra app that allows you to view the Rdocs of installed gems without using gem server. Nice. So I installed it on our sandbox server for all to enjoy.

But it got me thinking, there is another think I like to keep an eye on on our servers… log files. Oh, and I was looking for good excuse to play around with Sinatra. So, “with a one, and-a-two, and-a-three…” we have Sinatra-Tailer.

You can read all about it on the github page, but in short it simply performs a tail and displays the last X lines of the log file.

[sourcecode language=’bash’]
tail -n /path/to/my/log/file.log
[/sourcecode]

Features

  1. refreshes the list every X seconds, set by the user
  2. only one config.yml file to edit
  3. supports file globs, so you can grab a whole list of file with one line
  4. specify the number of lines to show
  5. completely unobtrusive js, because I’m cool?

Requirements

Sinatra framework

      (tested on 0.9.1.1, earlier may work)

I whipped this up pretty quickly so I’m sure there are a few bugs. There is some testing for a few unit tests, but nothing functional.

One word of warning, if you want to put this on a production server my recommendation is to put it on a separate port (like 9876) and for heaven’s sake, at a minimum use http basic authentication. From the sinatra readme:

Enjoy!

Posted in Ruby. Tagged with , , , .