Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). Speaking of searching, Logstash comes with a web interface for searching and drilling into all of your logs.
It is fully free and fully open source. The license is Apache 2.0, meaning you are pretty much free to use it however you want in whatever way.
For more info, see http://logstash.net/
Since version 1.4.0 of Logstash, some of the community-contributed plugins were moved to a new home in the Elasticsearch logstash-contrib repo. If you can't find a plugin here which you've previously used, odds are it is now located there. The good news is that these plugins are simple to install using the Logstash manual plugin installation script.
Need help? Try #logstash on freenode irc or the [email protected] mailing list.
You can also find documentation on the http://logstash.net site.
Here's how to get started:
# Install jruby
make vendor-jruby
Now install dependencies:
# Install logstash ruby dependencies
bin/logstash deps
Other commands:
# to use Logstash gems or libraries in irb, use the following
# this gets you an 'irb' shell with Logstash's environment
bin/logstash irb
# Run Logstash
bin/logstash agent [options]
# If running bin/logstash agent yields complaints about log4j/other things
# This will download the elasticsearch jars so Logstash can use them.
make vendor-elasticsearch
Notes about using other rubies. If you don't use rvm, you can probably skip this paragraph. Logstash works with other rubies, and if you wish to use your own ruby instead of the JRuby the Makefile gives you, you must set USE_RUBY=1 in your environment.
There are a few ways to run the tests. For development, using bin/logstash rspec <some spec> will suffice:
% bin/logstash rspec spec/filters/grok.rb
...................
Finished in 0.123 seconds
19 examples, 0 failures
Alternately, if you have just built the tarball, you can run the tests specifically on those like so:
make tarball-test
If you want to run all the tests from source, do:
make test
Building is not required. You are highly recommended to download the releases we provide from the Logstash site!
If you want to build the release tarball yourself, run:
make tarball
You can build rpms and debs, if you need those. Building rpms requires you have fpm, then do this:
make package
- Community: If a newbie has a bad time, it's a bug.
- Software: Make it work, then make it right, then make it fast.
- Technology: If it doesn't do a thing today, we can make it do it tomorrow.
All contributions are welcome: ideas, patches, documentation, bug reports, complaints, and even something you drew up on a napkin.
Programming is not a required skill. Whatever you've seen about open source and maintainers or community members saying "send patches or die" - you will not see that here.
It is more important to me that you are able to contribute.
For more information about contributing, see the CONTRIBUTING file.