Is there any way to display Rails' log files in the browser?

Question

This might be (read: probably is) a dumb question, but here goes...

Is there a simple, preferably non third-party, way to display Rails logs in the browser? It gets kind of old opening a log file, then closing it and re-opening it on the next error. It would be superfantastic to just to go domain.tld/logs, which would require user authentication, of course.

Answer 1

For reference, there is a very simple way to do this. However, you would want to protect this page with some sort of authentication/authorization.

Controller:

lines = params[:lines]
if Rails.env == "production"
  @logs = `tail -n #{lines} log/production.log`
else
  @logs = `tail -n #{lines} log/development.log`
end

Log File View:

<pre><%= @logs %></pre>

View to display link:

<%= link_to "log file", log_path(lines: 100) %>

Routes:

get 'logs/:lines' => "pages#log", as: "log"