This week I found a gem (literally) called glTail, it’s a log file visualizer using the tail command. All you need is Ruby and RubyGems. If you don’t have either of those (Ruby or RubyGems), follow this tutorial first.

First check to see what version of Ruby you have, open Terminal.app and type:

ruby -v

It should return something like:

ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [universal-darwin9.0]

Next you need to check which version of RubyGems that you have, again type:

The-Kid:~ garrett$ gem -v
1.3.1

If it’s anything lower than 1.3.1, I suggest upgrading it:

sudo gem update --system

After that you should be good to go to install the required gems.

sudo gem install net-ssh -v 1.1.4
sudo gem install ruby-opengl file-tail

Just to be safe we will install the glTail gem on it’s own after the previous gems were installed correctly.

sudo gem install gltail

After it is installed, simply go to your home directory, and install the yaml file (you can name it whatever you want).

gl_tail --new ~/config.yaml

This will place an easy to understand configuration file where you asked it to, now lets open up the config file, and add/edit our first site.

mate ~/config.yaml

That’s all you need to do, now lets run the command:

gl_tail configfile config.yaml

Now you should see something along the lines of:

That’s all you need to do, if you want more configuration, read on. Instead of just using the apache log, you can use any of the supported parsers; apache, iis, mysql, nginx, pix, postfix, postgresql, pureftpd, qmail, rails, squid, tshark.