Today I was helping out a friend in debugging a web application deployed on his web server. The problem we ran into was monitoring the log files generated by the application. Providing SSH access to me was too cumbersome task for us to embark on and I am glad we didn’t.

So, how do I get access to the log files? First thing we did was to ensure that the files are generated on a web directory, which is accessible to me from a web browser. For sometime I kept downloading the log file to analyze. This fast became a problem as the file size grew and I had to wait for the file to download completely before I could view it!

A quick google search for webtail took me to WebTail. A simple to use WebTail application which allows you to tail a file kept on a web server at regular intervals.

Just download and execute java -jar WebTail.jar <url> [update_interval]

That’s it!! If you provide the update_interval value of 0, and have a stable connection to the server, WebTail works just like the local tail command!!!

Thank you Paul, my next beer is dedicated to you

Who says laziness and impatience are bad? If we weren’t lazy enough (to configure SSH access) and impatient (to wait for the file to download completely to view it), we wouldn’t have found WebTail