Spank is a tool for receiving, indexing and browsing server and application logs. See Spanklogs.org for further info.

Note: There is a Virtualbox VM based distribution if all you want to do is test or play with it. Again, refer to Spanklogs.org for the details.Also, note that it is recommended to look at the downloads section to get a stable snapshot of the code, as the main branch might not work all the time due to the changes I do.

1. Install and setup ElasticSearch, refer to the official docs at elasticsearch.org

2. Replace your current syslog daemon with syslog-ng, on debian based distribution it should be as easy as running the following command:

   $ sudo apt-get install syslog-ng
   

3. Downlaod the latest tar.gz from https://github.com/msurdi/spank/downloads, extract, and cd to it.

   tar xvzf spank-x.x.tar.gz
   cd spank
   

4. Ensure you are running python >= 2.7 and pip

   $ python -V
   Python 2.7.3
   $ pip --version
   pip 1.0 from /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages (python 2.7)
   

5. Install python dependencies listed in the requirements.txt file:

   $ sudo pip install -r requirements.txt
   

6. Install spank package

   $ sudo python setup.py install
   

7. Install (if you don't have it already) supervisord, in debian based distros it should be as easy as:

   $ sudo apt-get install supervisor
   

8. Copy and modify the example supervisor configuration file:

   $ sudo cp contrib/supervisor/spank.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/  # Check the file and adapt it to your needs
   

9. Edit syslog-ng configuration to pipe log entries to spank forwarder.Restart syslog-ng.Look at the example syslog-ng config in contrib/syslog-ng/spank.conf.

10. Install nginx web server and setup a virtualhost for Spank, look at the example config in contrib/nginx/spank. If you don't know the path to the web interface static files, try with: $ python Python 2.7.3 (default, Apr 20 2012, 22:39:59) [GCC 4.6.3] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import spank >>> spank.__file__ '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/spank/__init__.pyc' Then the static file path for nginx config will be: /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/spank/web/client

Some things to keep in mind

• Ensure syslog-ng is listening on port udp/514, on the external ip address you want to send logs to
• The -L /dev/log part of the supervisor config example makes Spank own logs go over the local logging device. In the provided syslog-ng example file, we send to the index just what is received from the network. This way, we avoid an infinite loop that could happen if we generate logs when indexing, which are later indexed, which generate logs again, and so on.

If you found any problem, please, submit a bug report at [https://github.com/msurdi/spank/issues/]

Currently there are not so many tests as it should, but you can run the existing python one by running:

$ python -m unittest discover

in the root of the project. Ensure you have installed the python modules mock and simplejson additionaly to the ones in requirements.txt file.

This software is licensed under the Apache License 2.0