Broadcasting Server logs to browser 📡

In this tutorial, we will learn how to broadcast our server-side logs to browser for making development much more easier if you have 2–3 team members working on same project

Gaurav Mehla

Published in

_devblogs

3 min readJan 14, 2018

Why we need this ?

There are a lot of reasons to do this thing but mainly we can use this thing to simplify our development process. It is good if front-end developers also see what is happening behind the scenes.

Suppose you have a dev server and there are an API server running on it. Developers are accessing that API server for building Web or Mobile Applications. Sometimes while building the application, due to some false data, the API server get crashed and returns 502. In that case if you have direct server logs, you can see the cause of the error and fix that issue.

Prerequisites

Rtail
— There will be one server which will broadcast logs over particular host and one client listening for logs.
NodeJS App ( Demo App)
PM2 — Process Manager for NodeJS Apps

Steps

Run your NodeJS application and pipe rtail with it. i.e

node app.js | rtail --id api --host 127.0.0.1 --port 9999

2. Add this as start script in your package.json.

// package.json{
  "name": "rtail-demo",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node app.js | rtail --id api --host 127.0.0.1 --port 9999"
  },
  "license": "MIT",
  "dependencies": {
    "express": "^4.16.2",
    "morgan": "^1.9.0"
  }
}

3. Use PM2 to run your application as a process.

pm2 start npm -- start

4. Run rtail-server which will work as a reciever

rtail-server --web-version stable

⚠️ You can run rtail-server as a process also using PM2. Execute :
pm2 start rtail-server.

5. Visit http://localhost:8888 and you will get a screen like this

7. Now all the output logs of your app server will be streamed on the browser.

⚠️ For more rtail options — Visit Github

That’s it!!

Happy Coding !!

🎧 Listening to “Oogway’s Legacy — Kung Fu Panda”, Simply Beautiful and peaceful. Must listen.

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