We got a little tired of tailing our logs all day--especially remotely. I threw together a plugin (with enhancements from Todd and Aaron) that allows you to retrieve the logs for your request on-demand.

Rubyforge project

From the README:

BrowserLogger

edward.frederick@revolution.com rails-trunk@revolution.com

Appends just this request's logs to the end of the response. It's a little more convenient than tailing a log, especially when you're not logged in. For now, it's 'always on.' Feel free to modify init.rb to incorporate whatever on/off switch you want.

You'll get all the database logs as well, complete with rudimentary color coding and JS filtering.

This will always gather ALL logging actions, regardless of configured log level--helpful when you're in prod mode and want to debug a request without changing the log level and bouncing.

Usage:

Install plugin:

./script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/browser-logger

Fire up your rails app, make a request with log! or logs! appended as a query param.

e.g.:

http://localhost/pets/show/1 http://localhost/pets/show/1?log!

As a footnote, this particular process hook is extremely useful for hooking very deeply for actions such as profiling, logging, response filtering, etc.

Owner: Revolution on Rails

Home: http://revolutiononrails.blogspot.com/2007/01/stop-tailing-your-logs.html

Repository: svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/browser-logger

License: Rails' (MIT)

Category: Statistics and Logs