Epilog

Log viewing made simple.

The What

Epilog is a simple log viewing application written in Ruby on Rails, and a log aggregator written in Ruby. It uses Ferret, a Ruby port of the Apache Lucene indexer and search engine, and the acts_as_ferret Rails plugin to provide fast searching of rfc3164 formatted log files.

What that really means is:

Epilog makes viewing near real time logs through a web interface quick and easy.

The Why

Epilog was written by Lindsay Holmwood on behalf of Solutions First because we got tired of teaching clients how to use ssh, tail, and grep. We needed a quick way for people to check their mail logs on their own.

The How

The log aggregator is run over a log file. It acts as a glorified tail that chops up new log entries, outputs them to a database, and indexes them with Ferret.

The logs are viewed through the Epilog web interface. The logs can be searched using the Ferret Query Language syntax.

The Where

Epilog uses bzr for version control. The code can be checked out from http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/code/epilog.dev.

The TODO

• highlighting of search terms in result set
• date search (e.g. 'yesterday')
• RSS feeds on queries (eg. http://epilog/entry/find/joe@bloggs.com+helo/feed )
• view entries in reverse, like a network tail