A Five Minute Solution for Viewing Logs in a Laravel Application

Hi all, it’s been a few months since my last Laravel-related post. So, I decided to write something small to get back into the rhythm of things. I plan to publish something every month or even more frequently.

We have all been there — your Laravel app isn’t working as expected, and you want to get to logs as fast as possible. In most situations we may not have easy access to log files because we need an ssh client to connect to the server, then navigate to the logs, and finally view the last entry in there. It’s always a pain in the neck to do this. In this post, I want to show you my simple solution to viewing logs from within the app. I implemented this on a recent client project and it works quite well.

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As always, if you have a better implementation, please share, I would love to know about it.

Overview

Here’s an overview of my solution. I have a route to a page, whose controller reads that day’s log file and sends it to the view. The view has two parts; it has a form to change the date of the currently viewed file and a section where the logs are shown.

Pretty simple aye? If it was not clear enough, check the code below.

Code

First off, add a route where you want to display the log file entries

Then comes the controller. Below is the logic for the controller. Here, we get the date for when we need the logs for. Then, we extract information about the file and its contents and send it to the view.

Here, in the view, we have two parts — one to change the date of the Log file and the other to view the actual Log file’s contents.

Once you put everything together, you will have your own Log Viewer. The image below is what I have after adding some CSS. Not bad for like five minutes of work.

Conclusion

I hope this solution is of some use to you. If you have a better solution to do the same, do let them know. I am more than glad to try it.

Related resources

• https://laravel.com/docs/6.0/errors.
• https://github.com/rap2hpoutre/laravel-log-viewer.
• https://github.com/ARCANEDEV/LogViewer.

That’s all for now. Talk to you in the next one.

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