Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). Speaking of searching, Logstash comes with a web interface for searching and drilling into all of your logs.

It is fully free and fully open source. The license is Apache 2.0, meaning you are pretty much free to use it however you want in whatever way.

For more info, see http://logstash.net/

Since version 1.4.0 of Logstash, some of the community-contributed plugins were moved to a new home in the Elasticsearch logstash-contrib repo. If you can't find a plugin here which you've previously used, odds are it is now located there. The good news is that these plugins are simple to install using the Logstash manual plugin installation script.

Need help? Try #logstash on freenode irc or the [email protected] mailing list.

You can also find documentation on the http://logstash.net site.

To get started, you'll need any ruby available and it should come with the rake tool.

Here's how to get started with Logstash development:

rake bootstrap

Other commands:

# to use Logstash gems or libraries in irb, use the following
# this gets you an 'irb' shell with Logstash's environment
bin/logstash irb

# Run Logstash
bin/logstash agent [options]

Notes about using other rubies. If you don't use rvm, you can probably skip this paragraph. Logstash works with other rubies, and if you wish to use your own ruby you must set USE_RUBY=1 in your environment.

We recommend using flatland/drip for faster startup times during development. To tell Logstash to use drip, set USE_DRIP=1 in your environment.

There are a few ways to run the tests. For development, using bin/logstash rspec <some spec> will suffice:

% bin/logstash rspec spec/filters/grok.rb
...................

Finished in 0.123 seconds
19 examples, 0 failures

If you want to run all the tests from source, do:

rake test

Building is not required. You are highly recommended to download the releases we provide from the Logstash site!

If you want to build the release tarball yourself, run:

rake artifact:tar

You can build rpms and debs, if you need those. Building rpms requires you have fpm, then do this:

# Build an RPM
rake artifact:rpm

# Build a Debian/Ubuntu package
rake artifact:deb

• Community: If a newbie has a bad time, it's a bug.
• Software: Make it work, then make it right, then make it fast.
• Technology: If it doesn't do a thing today, we can make it do it tomorrow.

All contributions are welcome: ideas, patches, documentation, bug reports, complaints, and even something you drew up on a napkin.

Programming is not a required skill. Whatever you've seen about open source and maintainers or community members saying "send patches or die" - you will not see that here.

It is more important to me that you are able to contribute.

For more information about contributing, see the CONTRIBUTING file.