Monitor Remote Error Logs with WebTail  

Posted by John to PHP on August 25th, 2008  

WebTail is a tool that mimics the Unix 'tail -f' command through a web interface.

The problem: A webhost generates log files filled with useful debugging information. Unfortunately if you don't have shell access to the server, in order to read the logs you have to download the entire log via FTP, then open it on your local machine. This process has a lot of overhead, especially if you just want to monitor the last few lines of the log (where the most recent messages live).

The solution: WebTail. Just upload the WebTail folder to your remote server, navigate to http://yourdomain/path/to/WebTail/, type in the URI to your error log, and hit 'Restart log'.

Head over to the WebTail download page to get v1.0, and see the full instructions.

WebTail was originally made by Marque to view PHP error logs on our Mosso hosted server. Therefore, it has only been tested in a few environments.