Tail: Command Line Debug

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    Tail: Command Line Debug
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    with Will Hetherington
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    In this video, we are going to discuss the tail command.
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    It's a Unix tool, and by default prints the last 10 lines of input
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    you provide to standard output, which makes it really useful for debugging.
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    This might have you asking, what is standard output?
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    Well, by default this is your terminal window.
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    In documentation, you'll often see this shortened to just "stdout," standard out.
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    Today we're going to use tail to examine some log files and then to watch those logs in real time
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    and then a practical application using tail to debug a white screen of death with a Drupal install.
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    So let's take a look at the most basic example. By default my web server's log files are located
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    in /var/log/apache2. And if we take a look at the access log, by default tail will print the last 10 lines
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    from the file you provide. Let's take a quick moment to look at the manual page, which you can open
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    by typing "man tail" at your terminal. I'm not going to discuss all of the options that you could pass to tail,
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    just the two that I find most useful. That would be -n or --lines. And you can pass an integer with the number of lines
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    you'd like to return. The other is -f or --follow, and this will keep showing output as the file grows.
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    So let's take a look at examples of both of those. If we take the -n flag and pass, say, the number 50,
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    then we're going to get 50 lines of output back from tail, or rather tail's going to provide 50 lines of output
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    from the file that we passed to it if indeed 50 lines exist in the file. Otherwise it will show as many as it can.
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    My other favorite is -f or --follow. So the -f flag or --follow, it's really useful for watching your log files
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    in real time. So you'll notice at the bottom of my terminal, I don't have a prompt currently.
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    I do have a flashing cursor but no prompt. And the reason for that is that using the -f flag means that
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    tail will keep the file that we passed open to it, and it will keep printing the output to the terminal window
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    as soon as it's written to the file. So to show that in action, I am just going to refresh the browser
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    on the left-hand side a couple of times, and you'll see the log rows on the right-hand side happily being printed
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    by tail. Let's say, for a second, that you're developing a new module for your Drupal install.
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    Everything's been going swimmingly until you press F5 or click refresh on your browser, and the dreaded white screen of death appears.
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    At this point you probably don't have much idea about the problem that you've arrived at.
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    This is where tail can really come to the rescue. So first things first. We're going to want to take a look
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    at our web server's error log. This is most often, when you arrive at a white screen of death, where you'll find
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    more information. Running the tail command and the path to our error.log, you will be able to see
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    the last 10 lines of output which will hopefully give us some clues as to what the problem might be.
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    So just by reading the last couple of lines in this error.log, you'll see that it says the allowed memory size
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    has been exhausted. So this is most likely an issue with the memory limit in your PHP configuration.
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    Now to be clear, tail doesn't try and help us fix the problem. It really helps us to pinpoint or narrow down
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    what or where it might be. In this case, my issue was a problem with PHP's max memory,
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    and after increasing the allowed max memory, I've restarted my web server, and my site is back in action.
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    So in this video, we've covered examining your access and your error logs with tail, also how to watch those log files
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    in real time with tail, and then a practical application where we use tail to analyze a white screen of death
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    from a Drupal install from a log perspective. Thanks for watching.

Command Line Basics

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Tail: Command Line Debug

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4 minutes 19 seconds // HDCC //

This is an introduction to the Tail command, available on Unix/Linux systems. Tail has many applications, but this video concentrates on its basic usage and useful options, as they pertain to Drupal developers.

You'll learn how to take a quick peek at recent log messages from a single log file, how to do the same thing with multiple logs, as well as watching log files in real time! We'll finish up with a practical application, to see why this is useful.

Commands used in this video:

To view the documentation (or manual) for the tail command:
man tail

To show the last 20 lines of the webserver's access log file:
tail /var/log/apache2/access.log

To show the last 20 lines of the webserver's error log file:
tail /var/log/apache2/error.log

To show the last 20 lines of the webserver's error log file and continue to print new lines added to the file:
tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log

Additional resources:
There are no resources for this video. If you believe there should be, please contact us.

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