Tailon

Fork of gvalkov/tailon.

Tailon is a webapp for looking at and searching through files and streams.
In a nutshell, it is a fancy web wrapper around the following commands:

tail -f
tail -f | grep
tail -f | awk
tail -f | sed

What sets tailon apart from other similar projects is:

• Fully self-contained executable. Just download (or build) and run.
• Responsive and minimal user-interface.

Install

Docker

docker run

docker run --rm ghcr.io/niniyas/tailon:beta --help

docker compose

version: "3.9"
services:
  tailon:
    container_name: Tailon
    image: ghcr.io/niniyas/tailon:beta
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    volumes:
      - /var/log/syslog:/syslog
      - /var/log/log1:/log1
      - .tailon/config:/config  # If you need to load from config file, put your config.toml in this folder.
    command: -b :8080 "group=Syslog,alias=syslog,/syslog" "group=group1,/log1/*.log"
    command: -c /config/config.toml # If you need to load from config file

Releases

Download a build for your platform from the releases page.

Changelog

See changelog.

Usage

Tailon is a command-line program that starts a local HTTP server, which in turn streams the output of commands such as tail and grep.
It can be configured from its command-line interface or through the convenience of a toml config file.
Some options, like adding new commands, are only available through the configuration file.

To get started, run tailon with the list of files that you wish to monitor.

tailon /var/log/apache/access.log /var/log/apache/error.log /var/log/messages

Tailon can serve single files, globs or whole directory trees.
Tailon’s server-side functionality is summarized entirely in its help message:

Usage: tailon -c <config file>
Usage: tailon [options] <filespec> [<filespec> ...]

Tailon is a webapp for looking at and searching through files and streams.

  -a, --allow-download         Allow file downloads. (default true)
  -b, --bind string            Listen on the specified address and port (default ":8080")
  -c, --config string          Config.toml file location.
  -h, --help                   Show this help message and exit
  -e, --help-config            Show configuration file help and exit
      --history-lines int      No. of history lines to tail.
      --lines-to-tail int      No. of lines to tail. (default 100)
  -r, --relative-root string   Webapp relative root. (default "/")

Tailon can be configured through a config file or with command-line flags.

The command-line interface expects one or more filespec arguments, which
specify the files to be served. The expected format is:

  [alias=name,group=name]<spec>

where <spec> can be a file name, glob or directory. The optional 'alias='
and 'group=' specifiers change the display name of the files in the UI and
the group in which they appear.

A file specifier points to a single, possibly non-existent file. The file
name in the UI can be overwritten with 'alias='. For example:

  tailon alias=error.log,/var/log/apache/error.log

A glob evaluates to the list of files that match a shell file name pattern.
The pattern is evaluated each time the file list is refreshed. An 'alias='
specifier overwrites the parent directory of each matched file in the UI.

  tailon "/var/log/apache/*.log" "alias=nginx,/var/log/nginx/*.log"

If a directory is given, all files under it are served recursively.

  tailon /var/log/apache/ /var/log/nginx/

Example usage:
  tailon file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt
  tailon alias=messages,/var/log/messages "/var/log/*.log"
  tailon -b localhost:8080,localhost:8081 -c config.toml

For information on usage through the configuration file, please refer to the
'--help-config' option.

Config File

Tailon can be configured through a TOML config file.
The config file allows more configurability than the command-line interface.

  # The <title> of the index page.
  title = "Tailon"

  # The root of the web application.
  relative-root = "/"

  # The addresses to listen on. Can be an address:port combination or an unix socket.
  listen-addr = [":8080"]

  # Allow download of know files (only those matched by a filespec).
  allow-download = true

  # Commands that will appear in the UI.
  allow-commands = ["tail", "grep", "grep -v", "sed", "awk"]

  title = "Tailon"
  relative-root = "/"
  listen-addr = [":8080"]
  allow-download = true
  lines-of-history = 0
  lines-to-tail = 100
  allow-commands = ["tail", "grep", "grep -v", "sed", "awk"]

  [files]
    file1 = "alias=test,group=test_group,log.log"
    file2 = "alias=test1,group=test_group1,log.log"

  [commands]
    [commands.tail]
    action = ["tail", "-n", "$lines", "-F", "$path"]

    [commands.grep]
    stdin = "tail"
    action = ["grep", "-e", "$script"]
    default = ".*"

    [commands.sed]
    stdin = "tail"
    action = ["sed", "-u", "-e", "$script"]
    default = "s/.*/&/"

    [commands.awk]
    stdin = "tail"
    action = ["awk", "--sandbox", "$script"]
    default = "{print $0; fflush()}"

    [commands."grep -v"]
    stdin = "tail"
    action = ["grep", "-v", "--text", "--line-buffered", "--color=never", "-e", "$script"]
    default = "^$"

Labels

Tailon will automatically convert the following to labels:

Log levels

• EMERGENCY
• ALERT
• CRITICAL
• ERROR
• WARNING
• WARN
• NOTICE
• INFO
• DEBUG

HTTP Methods

• GET
• POST
• PUT
• HEAD
• DELETE
• PATCH
• OPTIONS
• CONNECT
• TRACE

Others

• FAILED
• FAILURE

Security

Tailon runs commands on the server it is installed on. While commands that accept a script argument (such as awk, sed and grep) should be invulnerable to shell injection, they may still allow for arbitrary command execution and unrestricted access to the filesystem.

To clarify this point, consider the following input to the sed command:

s/a/b'; cat /etc/secrets

This will result in an error, as tailon does not invoke commands through a shell. On the other hand, the following command is a perfectly valid sed script that has the same effect as the above attempt for shell injection:

r /etc/secrets

The default set of enabled commands - tail, grep and awk - should be safe to use. GNU awk is run in sandbox mode, which prevents scripts from accessing your system, either through the system() builtin or by using input redirection.

By default, tailon is accessible to anyone who knows the server address and port.

Development

Requirements

If you are on Windows, use WSL2. Install Ubuntu from Microsoft Store.

• GO: v1.18. I followed this guide.
• Node.js: v16.*. I followed this guide.
• Make: sudo apt-get install make
• entr: sudo apt-get install entr

git clone https://github.com/NiNiyas/tailon.git
cd tailon
export GOROOT=/usr/local/go
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin
go get

Note: The paths above might be different for you. Set this accordingly.

Frontend

The web interface is a written in plain ES5 with the help of some Vue.js. A simple makefile is used to bundle and compress the frontend assets. To work on the frontend, make sure you're building with the dev build tag:

go build -tags dev

This will ensure that the tailon binary is reading assets from the frontend/dist directory instead of from frontend/assets_vfsdata.go. To compile the web assets, use make all or make all BUILD=dev in case you want to simply concatenate files instead of also compressing them.

The make watch goal can be used to continuously update the bundles as you make changes to the sources. This requires entr.

Note that the minified frontend bundles are committed in order to avoid people wanting to work only on the backend from having to pull the full node_modules.

To build frontend, I have included a simple build_frontend script.
Make it executable with sudo chmod +x build_frontend.sh and run it ./build_frontend.sh.

Backend

The backend is written in straightforward go that tries to do as much as possible using only the standard library.

Alpine Linux build

• INFO: http://krolow.com.br/til/go-compile-binary-not-running-in-alpine-and-busybox/

CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -tags netgo -a -v

Backlog

See TODO.

Known Bugs

• When toolbar is hidden, last few lines are not visible in Fennec FDroid 101.1.1 build#1011120 8092b4e74+ and possibly other Firefox versions as well. Works fine on Bromite.

Testing

The project has unit-tests, which you can run with go test and integration tests which you can run with cd tests; pytest.
Alternatively, you can run both with make test.

The integration tests are written in Python and use pytest and aiohttp to interact with a running tailon instance.
To run the integration tests, you first need to install the needed dependencies:

Note: Python testing is broken. I have commented out the line in Makefile, I will take a look at it when I have time.

# Option 1: Using a virtualenv
python3 -m venv path/to/venv
source path/to/venv/bin/activate
python3 -m pip install -r tests/requirements.txt

# Option 2: User site-packages
python3 -m pip install --user -r tests/requirements.txt

Contribute

Please do contribute! Issues and pull requests are welcome. I could use some help.