logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). Speaking of searching, logstash comes with a web interface for searching and drilling into all of your logs.

It is fully free and fully open source. The license is Apache 2.0, meaning you are pretty much free to use it however you want in whatever way.

For more info, see http://logstash.net/

Need help? Try #logstash on freenode irc or the [email protected] mailing list.

You can also find documentation on the http://logstash.net site.

If you don't have JRuby already (or don't use rvm, rbenv, etc), you can have bin/logstash fetch it for you by setting USE_JRUBY:

USE_JRUBY=1 bin/logstash ...

Otherwise, here's how to get started with rvm:

# Install JRuby with rvm
rvm install jruby-1.7.4
rvm use jruby-1.7.4

Now install dependencies:

# Install logstash ruby dependencies
bin/logstash deps

Other commands:

# to use logstash gems or libraries in irb, use the following
# this gets you an 'irb' shell with logstash's environment
bin/logstash irb

# or use irb from the jar
java -jar logstash-<version>-monolithic.jar irb

# Run logstash
bin/logstash agent [options]

# If running bin/logstash agent yields complaints about log4j/other things
# This will download the elasticsearch jars so logstash can use them.
make vendor-elasticsearch

There are a few ways to run the tests. For development, using bin/logstash rspec <some spec> will suffice:

% bin/logstash rspec spec/filters/grok.rb 
...................

Finished in 0.123 seconds
19 examples, 0 failures

Alternately, if you have just built the flatjar, you can run the tests specifically on those like so:

make flatjar-test

If you want to run all the tests from source (not compiled jar), do:

make test

Finally, like 'bin/logstash rspec' above, you can invoke the jar to run a specific test like so:

% java -jar logstash.jar rspec spec/filters/grok.rb
...................

Finished in 0.346 seconds
19 examples, 0 failures

Building is not required. You are highly recommended to download the releases we provide from the logstash site!

If you want to build the jar yourself, run:

make flatjar

To update a flat jar previously built with 'make flatjar', run:

make update-flatjar

You can build rpms and debs, if you need those. Building rpms requires you have fpm, then do this:

make package

• Community: If a newbie has a bad time, it's a bug.
• Software: Make it work, then make it right, then make it fast.
• Technology: If it doesn't do a thing today, we can make it do it tomorrow.

All contributions are welcome: ideas, patches, documentation, bug reports, complaints, and even something you drew up on a napkin.

Programming is not a required skill. Whatever you've seen about open source and maintainers or community members saying "send patches or die" - you will not see that here.

It is more important to me that you are able to contribute.

For more information about contributing, see the CONTRIBUTING file.