nerdTail

A simple tool to see logs in the browser 🐛

nerdTail is a command line utility that grabs every line in stdin from a process, and broadcasts it over UDP. Tail log files, app output, or whatever you wish. See multiple streams in the browser, in realtime.

Heavily inspired by rtail (we copied a lot of the implementation from there).

The way it works is that you pipe the output of a process to nerdTail, then you open nerdTailServer and then you open the browser to http://localhost:9999 (or whatever port you specify).

This is very much a work in progress, and it's ABSOLUTELY NOT READY for production use.

⚙️ The way it works:

• nTail expects to be piped a stream of logs from a process, and when that happens, it will send those logs through a UDP socket that nTailServer listens.

# Example:
YOUR_APP 2>&1 | nerdTail <OTHER OPTIONS>

• nTailServer listens for logs that were sent, and sends them to a frontend client (through websocket). The client (a SolidJS SPA) displays the logs on the browser.

☑ TODO LIST (in order of priority):

• [x] Make it so that the nTailServer runs both the frontend and the BFF server at the same time (prefferably in the same process) (right now you've got to run nerdTailServer and npm run:dev)
• [ ] Add filtering for logs in the UI, improve storing and handling data.
• [ ] Add lots of styling improvements
• [ ] Add tests
• [ ] Add more documentation
• [ ] Figure out if this works across networks

🧑🏻‍💻 Developing Locally

There are 3 scripts in the package.json file that should help:

• test:publisher: runs a test publisher that sends a bunch of logs to the server constantly
• test:server: runs the server that acts as the subscriber to the publishers
• dev: runs the frontend server, that connects to the subscriber server (you only need to run this while developing).

Running it locally as if it were installed on your machine

You can use the test:publisher and test:server scripts to test some log source locally, or install this locally and use it as a CLI tool:

$ npm install

And then

$ npm link

Then you can run nerdTail and nerdTailServer from anywhere in your system.

🙋🏻 FAQ

Why do you have separate server for the frontend and the subscriber-backend?

Because a browser app can't interact with UDP sockets directly. So we need to have a separate server that can receive the UDP packets and then broadcast them to the browser (through websockets, but it could be anything really).

Why use Solid?

It's supposed to be very fast, and I want this to be able to handle large loads of data