How to view PHP or Apache error log online in a browser?

Question

Is there a way to view the PHP error logs or Apache error logs in a web browser?

I find it inconvenient to ssh into multiple servers and run a "tail" command to follow the error logs. Is there some tool (preferably open source) that shows me the error logs online (streaming or non-streaming?

Thanks

Answer 1

A simple php code to read log and print:

<?php

  exec('tail /var/log/apache2/error.log', $error_logs);

  foreach($error_logs as $error_log) {

       echo "<br />".$error_log;
  }

 ?>

You can embed error_log php variable in html as per your requirement. The best part is tail command will load the latest errors which wont make too load on your server.

You can change tail to give output as you want

Ex. tail myfile.txt -n 100 // it will give last 100 lines

Answer 2

Since everyone is suggesting clarity, I would also like to mention tailon. I wrote tailon as a more modern and secure alternative to clarity. It's still in its early stages of development, but the functionality you need is there. You may also use wtee, if you're only interested in following a single log file.

Answer 3

See What commercial and open source competitors are there to Splunk? and I would recommend https://github.com/tobi/clarity

Simple and easy tool.