This package defines a mode and functions to aid with monitoring, debugging and
forensics using journald logs via journalctl.
Project Status: This project is functional and active! See Status and Future below.
This provides an experience that builds upon that of viewing logs via async-shell-command (M-&).
One or more journalctl log view commands are spawned via the minibuffer, with standard Emacs completion and history. Packages such as bash-completion.el are recommended to enhance command building.
This journalctl package brings the following additional features:
- rich and clear text highlighting
- Multiple simultaneous journalctl processes may run, interleaving output, E.g.:
- simultaneously view a broad query, say at '--priority warning' along with a more narrowly focused '--priority debug' query.
- Dig into the output within or near a region by requesting additional log
records. To facilitate this, if the region is active when spawning an
additional command, the kill ring is augmented with a
--since=... --until=...string generated from the region's timestamps.
- The complete JSON log record is processed facilitating rich features
- The full JSON record for a given log line under point may be summoned and examined
- Where the record includes file name and line number data, you can jump from a message record line to the generating source file/line
Install the journalctl-mode.el and launch with M-x journalctl to get a prompt for your journalctl command line.
e.g.:
(use-package journalctl-mode
:bind ("C-c C-j" . journalctl))Installing bash-completion.el is highly recommended in general for command execution throughout Emacs, and assists greatly with generating journalctl commands.
Further details and key bindings are included in the Commentary section of ./journalctl-mode.el and docstrings of the entry functions.
Despite minimal activity and limited bling and polish, this package has been solid and invaluable as-is to the author and is likely to remain a maintained project. I hope you find it as useful as I do.
So far the author's time-poverty has meant the modest benefit:effort ratio of the currently conceived enhancements has not won out. Though I am increasingly interested in genericizing the codebase for use beyond journald (#16).
Some nice-to-haves are in the Issues list, and more suggestions or bug reports, and especially helpful PRs, are gratefully received to improve this project.
A prior package called journalctl-mode (rather than just journalctl) exists with a rather different focus and approach. This one fetches and interleaves JSON data using multiple simultaneous asynchronous journalctl queries, while the other offers a UI for query-building and chunked synchronous data loading.