Lumberjack - log viewer for Elixir and Erlang

hauleth

I have created simple log viewer for your applications. It is not yet published on Hex as it still needs a little bit polishing and documentation, but I thought that it can be interesting for some of you.

Example of web UI:

Repo:

https://github.com/hauleth/lumberjack

While this has some common ground with upcoming Phoenix Dashboard there are some crucial differences:

This one do not require Phoenix at all. It is implemented in pure Plug and uses SSE instead of web sockets
This focus only on logs, without any other stuff
This allows to show logs from different places as well. Currently supported sources are:
- Erlang logger (which is also used by Elixir Logger)
- Socket (for now UDP only)
- Filesystem (quite buggy, but in progress)

The external sources can be useful for example if you want to check out logs of your DB together with your application logs for quicker bughunt or performance monitoring.

For now it do not show metadata anywhere, but the plan is to have a way to view more informations about that log message.

Future improvements:

Filters for removing unneeded messages from external sources
Parsers to extract informations from the external log sources
Search in the webUI
Maybe add persistence to webUI
Fix bugs and make the FS source more robust

9 comments

#logging #library #development #logger #lumberjack

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2025-04-06 07:29:51 UTC

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hauleth

Added few new features:

Hide source by default, as most of the users will probably use only one source so it is needless clutter
Light and dark theme support
Messages on critical and above levels are now on highlighted background

Post #1

outlog

looking great! - could also be of great use on a Nerves device outputting the Ringlogger..

Post #2

hauleth

I think I could work on migrating RingLogger to the Erlang Logger and then it indeed would be nice to have, as this would allow me to have persistence layer within the application.

Post #3

hauleth

Someone created topic Structured logging on localhost which give me some energy to revive it a little.

For now on master there is version with updated version dependency for file_system which allows it to build with new Phoenix releases.

Also I am working on colours that will be a little bit more readable as well as with adding colouring to metadata view.

In addition to that I am planning on adding limiter that will drop old DOM nodes if there is more than N entries to reduce memory consumption when there is a lot of logs.

I am also planning on dropping plug_cowboy dependency and instead force the user to setup HTTP server when needed.

Post #4

D4no0

Very nice, thanks for updating it!

Lately reading error messages from phoenix has become a pretty substantial problem for me. This solution might provide the perfect experience for dev environments where you don’t want to run a series of log collection and processing services.

Post #5

Terbium-135

Looking forward to see this change!

And of course: Thx for your work

Post #6

jberling

I feel a little stupid, but what do I need to do to make it work? I have added it to my dependencies and I have updated my config with the sources. Should that be enough, or do I need to do any additional steps? Where can I see the UI in your screenshots?

Post #7