Stail

Tail over SSH

What is stail

A command line wrapper to tail multiple files over ssh.

Why

Often, I need to monitor logs of multiple instances of a same service, but SSH'ing and then running tail command was tedious but I still wanted to be able to use my ~/.ssh/config.

How to get it

curl -sf https://gobinaries.com/sitaramshelke/stail | sh

How to use it

stail ssh-host-1,file-path-1 ssh-host-2,filepath

Any prerequisites?

Yes!
The host needs be accessible over ssh without a password prompt. Well, the password prompt works when you mention a single host but in case of multiple hosts, your stdin can't be passed to the ssh prompt.

Its expected that you have a direct SSH access to the host without needing to do anything else. Eg. If you're using a bastion/jumpbox, you have a ProxyCommand config in your ~/.ssh/config.

Why not handle the ssh host configuration in a more cleaner way?

I did spend some time looking at Go's ssh library and while it provides excellent APIs but I felt two problems -

• I didn't want to write my own SSH client just for tailing logs.
• I didn't want to pass all of these fancy feature flags and limit the use to just for one purpose.

Anything cool?

It does adds colors to hostnames if your terminal supports it.

Anything else?

Feel free to raise an Issue or a PR if you'd like to contribute.