Tailing Logs in Capistrano

Quite often you might find yourself wanting to tail the logs for your remote servers. SSHing into the remote machine and manually tailing the logs is a bit cumbersome, so I’m going to show you how to do it with Capistrano (v3).

It’s actually quite simple. Create a file called lib/capistrano/tasks/tail.cap and add the following code.

namespace :tail do
  desc "tail rails logs" 
  task :rails do
    on roles(:app) do
      execute "tail -f #{fetch(:shared_path)}/log/#{fetch(:rails_env)}.log"
    end
  end
end

The task can be invoked by running:

cap production tail:rails