PHP Web Logfile Watcher

Introduction

This is a PHP-based web log file watching utility similar to the Linux/Unix tail command. This utility is currently based around Apache v2 but can be extended in the future to support additional web servers.

Setup

By default, Apache is not able to view the /var/log/apache2/ log files. This is necessary for this script to work.

To allow it, you need to enable apache (and therefore php) to run two commands using sudo without a password:

/usr/bin/tail -f /var/log/apache2/[filename]
/bin/ls /var/log/apache2/[filename]

Step 1)

Run two commands with sudo to enable them:

sudo echo 'www-data  ALL=(:adm) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/tail -f /var/log/apache2/*' >> /etc/sudoers
sudo echo 'www-data  ALL=(:adm) NOPASSWD:/bin/ls /var/log/apache2/*' >> /etc/sudoers

Step 2)

Upload this script to your web server.

Usage:

Just browse to the script you uploaded to your webserver, passing in the name of an apache log file you want to tail in the format of: log=[filename]

Example:

https://site.com/tail.php?log=error.log

Customization:

Themes

There are several themes available that you can switch between.

black_on_white
black_on_gray
white_on_blue
yellow_on_blue
white_on_gray
white_on_black
gray_on_black
gray_on_gray
yellow_on_gray
yellow_on_black
red_on_gray
red_on_black
yellow_on_brown
white_on_brown
white_on_orange

By default gray_on_black is enabled. To change this, you can edit the index.php script and update the value on the line:

$style = 'gray_on_black';

You can also add additional ones if you so desire, by editing the style.css file.

deanhouseholder/php-web-logfile-watcher