rtail(1) (DO NOT USE IT YET)

Stupid simple UNIX style stream broadcast over UDP in your browser.

rtail is a command line utility that grabs every line in stdin and broadcast it over UDP. That's it, nothing fancy, nothing complicated. You can tail your log files, your app logs or whatever you wish to pipe in rtail to a rtail-server and see multiple streams in the browser, realtime.

Installation

$ npm install -g rtail

Rationale

If you develop software for work and you deploy your code on remote servers using multiple environments, or simply have multiple projects, you know that to monitor realtime your logs you need to ssh to every single machine running your code.

There are many log aggregation tools out there, and few of them are realtime. Most of them require you to change your application source code to support their logging protocol/transport.

This is meant to be a replacement of logio which was a cool idea, but not actively maintained anymore, doesn't support node v0.12.* and uses TCP, which means strict handshaking between servers and clients other than being resource consuming and very difficult to scale.

rtail approach is very simple:

• pipe something into it using UNIX I/O redirection [2]
• broadcast every line using UDP
• rtail-server if listening will dispatch the stream into your browser using socket.io.

There is no persistent layer and it is not meant to persist any data, rtail is a realtime monitoring tool meant to aggregate multiple streams and serve them with a modern web interface, mostly for debugging and realtime monitoring. If you need a persistent layer use something like loggly.

Examples

In your init script:

$ node server.js 2>&1 | rtail --id "api.myproject.com"

$ mycommand | rtail > server.log

$ node server.js 2>&1 | rtail --mute

Supports JSON lines

$ while true; do echo [1, 2, 3, "hello"]; sleep 1; done | rtail
$ echo { "foo": "bar" } | rtail

Using log files

$ node server.js 2>&1 > log.txt
$ tailf log.txt | rtail

For fun and debugging

$ cat ~/myfile.txt | rtail
$ echo "Server rebooted!" | rtail --id `hostname`

Params

$ rtail  -h
Usage: cmd | rtail --host [string] --port [num] [--mute] [--id [string]]

Examples:
  server | rtail --host 127.0.0.1 > server.log     broadcast to localhost + file
  server | rtail --port 43567                      custom port
  server | rtail --mute                            only remote
  server | rtail --id api.domain.com               name the log stream


Options:
  --mute, -m        don't pipe stdin with stdout
  --host            the recipient server host     [default: "127.0.0.1"]
  --port, -p        the recipient server port     [default: 9999]
  --id, --name, -n  the log stream id             [default: uuid()]
  --help, -h        Show help
  --version, -v     Show version number

rtail-server(1)

rtail-server catches all messages broadcasted from every rtail client and serves a web interface to view the incoming log streams in realtime. Under the hood uses socket.io to pipe every incoming UDP message to the browser.

There is tiny to nothing to configure, you can chage the default UDP/HTTP ports, but other than that you're all set.

Examples

With default values

$ rtail-server

With custom ports

$ ratil-server --web-port 8080 --udp-port 9090

Open your browser and start tailing logs!

Params

$ rtail-server
Usage: rtail-server [--udp-host [string] --udp-port [num] --web-host [string] --web-port [num]]

Examples:
  rtail-server --web-port 8080    custom http port
  rtail-server --udp-port 8080    custom udp port


Options:
  --udp-host, --uh  the listening udp hostname   [default: "localhost"]
  --udp-port, --up  the listening udp port       [default: 9999]
  --web-host, --wh  the listening http hostname  [default: "localhost"]
  --web-port, --wp  the listening http port      [default: 8888]
  --help, -h        Show help
  --version, -v     Show version number

UDP Broadcasting

You may want to scale and broadcast on multiple servers, in that case just instruct the rtail client to stream to the broadcast address and every message will be delivered to all servers in your subnet.

Authentication layer

The webapp doesn't have an authentication layer for the time being, it's assumed you run it behind a VPN or a reverse proxy with a simple Authorization header check.

How to contribute

This project follows the awesome Vincent Driessen branching model.

• You must add a new feature on his own topic branch
• You must contribute to hot-fixing directly into the master branch (and pull-request to it)

This project follows (more or less) the Felix's Node.js Style Guide, your contribution must be consistent with this style.

The test suite is written on top of visionmedia/mocha and it took hours of hard work. Please use the tests to check if your contribution is breaking some part of the library and add new tests for each new feature.

$ npm test

License

This software is released under the MIT license cited below.

Copyright (c) 2014 Kilian Ciuffolo, [email protected]. All Rights Reserved.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.