This might be (read: probably is) a dumb question, but here goes...
Is there a simple, preferably non third-party, way to display Rails logs in the browser? It gets kind of old opening a log file, then closing it and re-opening it on the next error. It would be superfantastic to just to go domain.tld/logs, which would require user authentication, of course.
For reference, there is a very simple way to do this. However, you would want to protect this page with some sort of authentication/authorization.
Controller:
lines = params[:lines]
if Rails.env == "production"
@logs = `tail -n #{lines} log/production.log`
else
@logs = `tail -n #{lines} log/development.log`
end
Log File View:
<pre><%= @logs %></pre>
View to display link:
<%= link_to "log file", log_path(lines: 100) %>
Routes:
get 'logs/:lines' => "pages#log", as: "log"
All you need is to open log file and put its content into browser.
Realted topic: ruby: all ways to read from file.
Also you should know that your logs grow very fast, and it's not a good idea to show whole log in browser. You can just open last 100-200 rows. Related topic: Reading the last n lines of a file in Ruby?
Also you can try this solution: http://newrelic.com/. It is more complex and little oftopic, but quite useful.
I created a for this purpose called browserlog.
Installing is just a matter of adding the gem to the Gemfile:
gem 'browserlog'
Afterwards all you need is to mount the engine on the route you want:
MyApp::Application.routes.draw do
mount Browserlog::Engine => '/logs'
end
Once that's set up, accessing /logs/development (or production, test, etc) will show a window like this:
(source: andredieb.com)
Pimp my Log can be used to visualization many types of logs including Ruby on Rails.
It also includes the management of users and notification.
[Edited]
By default, the PimpMyLog does not support Ruby on Rails logs. It's necessary to implement the regex to works with it.
[/Edited]
