Is there a CLI to tail logs from AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Question

Is there a CLI utility for tailing logs from Elastic Beanstalk applications. Specifically a python flask application.

You can use their eb CLI to get a snap shot ...

eb logs 

But I would like to do (similar to what heroku offers)...

eb logs --tail 

Has any one accomplished this?

Thanks!

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Some references:

• Working with logs on Elastic Beanstalk
• EB CLI

Answer 1

UPDATE: My answer keeps getting upvotes, but things have changed since 2013. It is now easier to tail EB logs—look at posit labs's answer for a simpler way to do it :-).

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Original answer:

I had been struggling with this one too. The eb CLI utility does not seem to allow for tailing your application logs currently.

However, you can tail these logs by:

1. Creating a key pair in the EC2 console (which should give you a .pem file)
2. Linking your EB instance to this key pair (in the EB console)
3. Finding the public DNS of your instance in the EC2 console
4. Connecting to your instance via ssh (`ssh -i [yourpemfile.pem] ec2-user@[your.public.dns]
5. Tailing your log file. For a Node.js application, that's tail -f /var/log/nodejs/nodejs.log. I don't know what's the equivalent for a Flask application.

(Thanks to Richard Soutar for pointing me in the right direction on this one.)

Answer 2

You can use the -g flag to set the log group, then use --stream to stream the results. No need to ssh into a specific machine.

eb logs -g /aws/elasticbeanstalk/yourApp-env/var/log/nodejs/nodejs.log --stream