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Comment by deanstag | Hacker News Reader

I am curious. What is the usecase of this?

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!

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.

less is great, and I'm certainly comfortable using it (nice snippet btw!). Other devs on my team who are more web focused would probably find rtail easier to use.

We also have a Vagrant box for each project, and rtail would be trivial to add to the Vagrant template so that every development box has this running on a specific port without any setup or fiddling needed by each developer. At least that's the direction I'm thinking of going in right now, without having actually tried it out. :)

+1 for a common tool chain. It's really nice when you don't have to spend 1/2 the day figuring out someone's setup to help them fix a bug.

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

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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com