django_logtail

Introduction

Logtail allows you to view logfiles for your django project via your django admin, and will also provide you with a live tail of the logfiles using ajax polling - and therefore without the need for a long-running django process.

Django 1.3+ compatible.

See Also: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django_logtail

Installation and Use

Django logtail takes a dictionary from your settings.py as follows:

LOGTAIL_FILES = {
    'apache': '/var/www/www.foo.com.log',
    'django': '/var/log/www.foo.com/project.log',
}

Add it via your installed apps:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'django_logtail',
)

Then absolutely ensure that the user that your django process runs as (whether it's via wsgi, fastcgi, django runserver for debugging, or something else) has permission to read all of the files in your LOGTAIL_FILES list.

logtail should then appear in your admin, and provide access to these files -including a live tail of the file. Note that files will not appear if the django process cannot access them.

Other Settings

You can set the default update interval for the log tailing:

LOGTAIL_UPDATE_INTERVAL = 50000 # Default is 3000 (three second)

Developing

You can build a development environment using the following instructions:

virtualenv venv --distribute
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .
python manage.py syncdb
python manage.py runserver

Logtail dumpdata Issue

If you use python manage.py dumpdata, be sure to add the --exclude=logtail flag to your command or you'll be presented with a:

CommandError: Unable to serialize database: relation "django_logtail_log" does not exist
LINE 1: SELECT "django_logtail_log"."id" FROM "django_logtail_log" O...

traceback when you run the dumpdata command. This is because django_logtail needs to pretend that it has a model called Log when registering with the django admin site (ModelAdmin objects can't exist without being bound to a Model).

syncdb will still work however, because the pretend model is marked as managed = False.