mtail

Building mtail

mtail is implemented in Go.

You will need to install a recent Go.

go get, quick and easy, no version information.

Fetch, build, and install the binary directly with go get

go install github.com/google/mtail/cmd/mtail

NOTE: If you do it this way, you won’t have a supported version of mtail.

The “Right Way”

Clone the source from GitHub into your $GOPATH. If you don’t have a $GOPATH, see the next section.

git clone https://github.com/google/mtail
cd mtail
make test install

Building

mtail uses a Makefile to build the source. This ensures the generated code is up to date and that the binary is tagged with release information.

Having fetched the source, use make from the top of the source tree. This will install all the dependencies, and then build mtail. This assumes that your Go environment is already set up – see above for hints on setting it up.

The resulting binary will be in $GOPATH/bin.

The unit tests can be run with make test, which invokes go test. The slower race-detector tests can be run with make testrace.

Cross-compilation

goreleaser is used to build the binaries available for download on the Releases page. If yuo want to build your own locally, fetch goreleaser and update the config file locally if necessary.

No Go

You can still run mtail and its programmes with Docker.

docker build -t mtail .
docker run -it --rm mtail --help

mtail is not much use without programme files or logs to parse, you will need to mount a path containing them into the container, as is done with the -v flag in the example below:

docker run -it --rm -v examples/linecount.mtail:/progs/linecount.mtail -v /var/log:/logs mtail -logtostderr -one_shot -progs /progs/linecount.mtail -logs /logs/messages.log

Or, via Docker Compose, e.g. this docker-compose.yml snippet example shows with the volume: section:

service:
  mtail:
    image: mtail
    command:
      - -logtostderr
      - -one_shot
      - -progs
      - /progs/linecount.mtail
      - -logs
      - /logs/messages.log
    volume:
      - type: bind
        source: /var/log
        target: /logs
        readonly: true
      - type: bind
        source: examples/linecount.mtail
        target: /progs/linecount.mtail

Contributing

Please use gofmt to format your code before committing. Emacs’ go-mode has a lovely gofmt-before-save function.

Please read the test writing section for mtail test style guidelines.

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