I appreciate this response, and want to say I really like your tool's UI over something like lazyjournal. But like the above commentor, I would love to see journald support as well, just because it's the default these days on the distros I use, and seems like the direction the Linux system industry has headed in.
I think it will impact first-time users giving nerdlog a quick test/trial run, and cause them to bounce to another tool when it doesn't show them logs from journald out of the box. Users can be finicky and impatient with new tools ;-)
Example: I'm running an Arch-based Linux desktop. Installing ryslog took several minutes to build and install. If I wasn't highly motivated to try out nerdlog, I would have canceled the install.
Also, can the SSH requirement for localhost be bypassed? Most users won't be running an SSH server on their desktop, and this would improve nerdlog's use-cases and make it easier for new users to give it a quick local test run.
Final suggestion: add `go get` support to your repo, so that I can install nerdlog from a single command and not have to clone the repo itself.
I first responded before your edit about ssh and localhost, so: yeah, as briefly mentioned in the article, as of today there's no shortcut even for localhost. I was debating whether I should implement this feature before open sourcing it, but I had to draw the line somewhere (I have TONS of ideas what could be implemented), and since reading local logs isn't the primary focus of nerdlog, I decided to skip it for now.
But yes the bypass for localhost can definitely be implemented.
Yeah, I'm bouncing for now on the localhost requirement. Or, on a related issue of not parsing my .ssh/config, a Match directive, and not wanting it to parse it yet. I grep'ed for an env var to override, but only USER and SSH_AUTH_SOCK are pulled in.
I did go get install ...nerdlog/cmd/nerdlog-tui@latest just fine.
Thanks for hacking in the open, and releasing early.
Hey mcint, fyi both of these issues are addressed: the localhost one is addressed for real, and a Match issue is worked around: while it's still not properly implemented, at least it doesn't prevent Nerdlog from starting now. Just in case you wanted to give it another try.
I would say that their thanks is sincere, and that they're applauding you for releasing a new tool to a public/critical audience while also taking feedback in very constructive manner.
Just posting it in case you want to subscribe to it. Looks like it's a popular demand indeed, so I'll at least poke it and see what kind of performance we can get out of it.
I have no doubt that journald is slower, and I have no real preference for it. The request for journald support goes back to it being the default on most distros these days. I have to interact with a variety of different servers in different environments, most of which are not managed by myself, and hence I have to interact with was previously setup... which is usually the default config provided by the distro.
I see, interesting. If you don't mind me asking, is it a sysadmin kind of job? Just trying to understand the use case better.
Regardless, journalctl support is the single most requested feature, so yeah I'll at least try to make that happen; hopefully on the upcoming weekend if I'm lucky.
My role is classified as DevOps consulting, working for several different companies, each with their own unique setup and teams... but yeah, it's basically glorified sysadmin work ;-). On the plus side though, I get to see the realities of internal company tech stacks, and that the default settings often are chosen over better solutions.
Thanks again for considering journald, and at the same time, don't forget that it's your project at the end of the day... you can always disregard feature requests if it's not a direction you want to head in. Though in this case, I do believe journald support would get your tool more traction with a larger audience in the long term.
Thanks for sharing! Good to know that nerdlog turns out to be helpful not only for devs (the original use case), but also for DevOps :)
Fyi, support for journalctl was added to master, in case you wanted to try it out. I didn't yet add automated tests with the mocked journalctl, but my manual tests show that it's working fine.
If a system doesn't have either `/var/log/messages` or `/var/log/syslog`, nerdlog will now resort to `journalctl` by default.
It can also be selected explicitly by specifying `journalctl` as the file, e.g. `myserver.com:22:journalctl`.
Looking good so far! Now it just needs localhost-without-SSH enabled by default (so that as a new user I test out nerdlog immediately without having to think about which server to connect it to), and your initial onboarding/out-of-the-box experience will be ready for a very wide audience! :-)
