Rtail – Terminal output to the browser using Unix pipes

http://rtail.org

by kilianciuffolo • 11 years ago

77 32 11 years ago

rtail.org

fredkelly• 11 years ago

This is really nicely done, thank you!

thehoff• 11 years ago

Nicely done and fantastic landing page!

chanux• 11 years ago

Good stuff. Kudos!

I really like how they ask for sponsors.

deanstag2• 11 years ago

I am curious. What is the usecase of this?

kilianciuffolo6• 11 years ago

https://github.com/kilianc/rtail#rationale let me know if you have more questions, hop in on gitter!

aethr2• 11 years ago

I can start using this immediately for debugging the backend of a web application during development. For some kinds of debugging, it's preferable to log output to a file or tty instead of printing on the page during a request or stepping through a debugger. This is particularly true in frameworks where you might be trying to debug something that's happened after the rendering step.

I would typically use standard debug logging and tail the output in a terminal while I test, but having that output in a browser, searchable, filterable by RegExp adds a whole additional layer of ease of use. Showing this to all the backend devs on my team today!

spinlock2• 11 years ago

It doesn't go to a browser (unless you use something like https://keymetrics.io/2015/06/10/pm2-ssh-expose-a-fully-capa...) but `less` is great for tailing logs, output, etc... and lets you search, filter, set marks.

foreman start -c web=1,all_worker=3 > /tmp/x & less -r+F /tmp/x; kill -SIGINT %

I run this inside of screen so that I can decide not to wrap the lines.

krakensden3• 11 years ago

ring ring ring

Hello?

The smoke tests are failing and Kibana isn't returning anything from the past 10 minutes

inaudible $ for i in grotty_old_server{1..10}; do ssh root@i "tail -f /var/log/froznob/goddamn-custom-logging-system" | rtail &; done

Are you still there?

Half of the servers are spewing the same stacktrace 200 times a second.

kilianciuffolo6• 11 years ago

Hello and thanks for reporting! Do you mind opening an issue on github with the error you are presented?

deanstag2• 11 years ago

I meant whats the advantage of viewing it in browser? Couldnt you go through the output in a terminal with multiplexers and tail?

hackerway• 11 years ago

nice work, web app's sweet!

kilianciuffolo6• 11 years ago

thanks, all credits to the amazing designers!

mmarx2• 11 years ago

Why does it have to be a custom network protocol when using syslog would not only suffice, but also allow for devices that don't run custom code (e.g., switches or routers) to be monitored?

krakensden3• 11 years ago

Syslog is a little bit warty- if I didn't use it elsewhere[1], I wouldn't necessarily reach for it. It seems like it should also be fairly trivial to just use your OS' syslog as a shim, if you wanted this to be a syslog endpoint.

[1]: many more people should than do

mmarx2• 11 years ago

Trivial, maybe. Not only does it add a single point of failure, though, as the logs get aggregated on the syslog host, the only “benefit” rtail retains is looking at the logs in a browser instead of tail(1).

rmetzler• 11 years ago

What is the difference to using websocketd [1] to stream to a socket.io client?

[1] https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd

icebraining• 11 years ago

This is a full solution with web app and such; websocketd is just a communication tool, which could be used to build something like rtail.

hackmiester• 11 years ago

Wow! This is really cool! I would love to use this at my workplace. I had a small problem, though: it seems the clients don't keep very much data.

For example, I filtered based on an expression that matched about 1-2 lines per second. The lines appeared, but disappeared almost as quickly. I suspect there is some small client-side buffer that I'm overrunning almost instantly; the log stream I used produces about 500 lines per second. Is this too much for the tool? Can I tune it to work with that load?

kilianciuffolo6• 11 years ago

Yeah, so the filter uses the internal buffer which is 100 lines. you can easily hack it to make it bigger (there is a closed github issue to look at for instructions). I don't want to make bigger buffers available just yet. I want to rewrite the webapp using ng2 and use an infinite scroll for the lines view. Feel free to open a new issue if you want!

ilovefood• 11 years ago

Superb, just installed it, setup took 1 minute and now I'm tailing 24 logs on one single page.

Thanks A LOT!

otherusername2• 11 years ago

Is there a XSS exploit in this? I just clicked on the 'alert' stream, and it displayed two alert dialogs.

ll_cool_james• 11 years ago

I think there is. I keep getting redirected to a 10 hour rick roll youtube video

paste0x78• 11 years ago

Ya loads http://bit.ly/1LRJuun that redirects to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BROWqjuTM0g&insecure_code=tr...

42["line",{"timestamp":1436363693619,"streamid":"rtail.org","host":"176.199.140.33","port":50049,"content":"<script>window.top.location.href=\"http://bit.ly/1LRJuun\"</script>","type":"string"}]

chinathrow• 11 years ago

Yes, flash 0days piped via terminal :)

Cthulhu_• 11 years ago

I got rick rolled :(. Probably an exploit in there.

kilianciuffolo6• 11 years ago

I fixed this for the demo already :)

fazza99• 11 years ago

lol. nice rickroll

gvalkov• 11 years ago

Nicely done - the design is amazing. I had to solve a similar problem a while ago and wrote tailon: https://github.com/gvalkov/tailon

Rtail – Terminal output to the browser using Unix pipes

Related Stories