README.md

Logweaver

A simple CLI tool to merge log files and display them interleaved in chronological order.

Features

• Automatically extracts timestamps from logs
• Uses terminal colors to help distinguish different logs
• Switches allow you to customize the output format, including "tail -F"
• Transparent support for gzipped log files
• Recursively process log files within a given directory (e.g. for supportsave)
• Written in Golang, compiles to a single executable. Runs on Unix, Windows.

Caveat - I put this tool together quickly for a specific purpose. It may be too limited for general use! There are no test cases...

Building

Logweaver uses Go modules, so it's best to compile with Go 1.12 or higher. Set GO111MODULE=on then run:

go get github.com/gcla/logweaver/cmd/logweaver

Then add ~/go/bin/ to your PATH.

From Source

If you want to rebuild the built-in rules too, you can compile from source. First fetch statik, a tool for embedding assets in Go binaries

go get github.com/rakyll/statik

Then rebuild logweaver:

git clone https://github.com/gcla/logweaver
cd logweaver
go generate ./...
go install ./...

Quick Start

Merge syslog and auth.log chronologically:

logweaver /var/log/syslog /var/log/auth.log

Only show log lines after October 15th at noon:

logweaver -d --after="October 15th 2020, 12:00" /var/log/syslog /var/log/auth.log

Make output look like tail -F - no timestamp prefix, log filename appears above log lines:

logweaver -F /var/log/syslog /var/log/auth.log

Similar to tail -F except timestamp is extracted and printed normalized as a prefix:

logweaver -G /var/log/syslog /var/log/auth.log

Turn off the terminal colors:

logweaver -c=no /var/log/syslog /var/log/auth.log

or

logweaver /var/log/syslog /var/log/auth.log | less

Customize

Logweaver writes out a user-config file ~/.logweaver.toml. Edit that file to add rules for your own logs. You need two pieces of information:

• A regex that extracts the full timestamp - where group #1 of the regex is the match (first paren group)
• A Golang format string to parse the timestamp - see https://golang.org/pkg/time/#pkg-constants

Limitations

• No automatic support for log files in reverse-chronological order
• Timestamp-extraction is driven by built-in regex rules, then a fallback to https://github.com/araddon/dateparse. This may not succeed on your log files. Customization is available via ~/.logweaver.toml.
• I haven't thought much about timezones.
• There are no test cases :-(