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). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.
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 https://www.elastic.co/products/logstash
Since version 1.5.0 beta1 (and current master) of Logstash, all plugins have been separated into their own repositories under the logstash-plugins github organization. Each plugin is now a self-contained Ruby gem which gets published to RubyGems.org. Logstash has added plugin infrastructure to easily maintain the lifecyle of the plugin. For more details and rationale behind these changes, see our blogpost.
Elasticsearch logstash-contrib repo is deprecated. We have moved all of the plugins that existed there into their own repositories. We are migrating all of the pull requests and issues from logstash-contrib to the new repositories.
For more info on developing and testing these plugins, please see the README on any plugin repository.
We are migrating all of the existing pull requests to their respective repositories. Rest assured, we will maintain all of the git history for these requests.
Please open new issues and pull requests for plugins under its own repository
For example, if you have to report an issue/enhancement for the Elasticsearch output, please do so here.
Logstash core will continue to exist under this repository and all related issues and pull requests can be submitted here.
- #logstash on freenode IRC
- logstash-users on Google Groups
- Logstash Documentation
- Logstash Product Information
- Elastic Support
Logstash uses JRuby which gets embedded in the vendor/jruby/ directory. It is recommended but not mandatory that you also use JRuby as your local Ruby interpreter and for this you should consider using a Ruby version manager such as RVM or rbenv. It is possible to run the rake tasks and the bin/ commands without having JRuby locally installed in which case the embedded JRuby will be used automatically. If you have a local JRuby installed you can force logstash to use your local JRuby instead of the embedded JRuby with the USE_RUBY=1 environment variable.
To get started, make sure you have a local JRuby or Ruby version 1.9.x or above with the rake tool installed.
On Windows make sure to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to the path to your JDK installation directory. For example set JAVA_HOME=<JDK_PATH>
To run logstash from the repo you must bootstrap the environment
rake bootstrap
or bootstrap & install the core plugins required to run the tests
rake test:install-core
To verify your environment, run bin/logstash version which should look like this
$ bin/logstash version
logstash 2.0.0.dev
For tesing you can use the test rake tasks and the bin/rspec command, see instructions below. Note that the bin/logstash rspec command has been replaced by bin/rspec.
1- In order to run the core tests, a small set of plugins must first be installed:
rake test:install-core
2- To run the logstash core tests you can use the rake task:
rake test:core
or use the rspec tool to run all tests or run a specific test:
bin/rspec
bin/rspec spec/foo/bar_spec.rb
Note that if a plugin is installed using the plugin manager bin/plugin install ... do not forget to also install the plugins development dependencies using the following command after the plugin installation:
bin/plugin install --development
To run the tests of all currently installed plugins:
rake test:plugin
You can install the default set of plugins included in the logstash package or all plugins:
rake test:install-default
rake test:install-all
Note that if a plugin is installed using the plugin manager bin/plugin install ... do not forget to also install the plugins development dependencies using the following command after the plugin installation:
bin/plugin install --development
The documentation for developing plugins can be found in the plugins README, see our example plugins:
- https://github.com/logstash-plugins/logstash-input-example
- https://github.com/logstash-plugins/logstash-filter-example
- https://github.com/logstash-plugins/logstash-output-example
- https://github.com/logstash-plugins/logstash-codec-example
Drip is a tool which help solve the slow JVM startup problem. The drip script is intended to be a drop-in replacement for the java command. We recommend using drip during development, in particular for running tests. Using drip, the first invokation of a command will not be faster but the subsequent commands will be swift.
To tell logstash to use drip, either set the USE_DRIP=1 environment variable or set JAVACMD=`which drip`.
Examples:
USE_DRIP=1 bin/rspec
USE_DRIP=1 bin/rspec
Caveats
Drip does not work with STDIN. You cannot use drip for running configs which uses the stdin plugin.
You can build a logstash package as tarball or zip file
rake artifact:tar
rake artifact:zip
You can also build .rpm and .deb, but the fpm tool is required.
rake artifact:rpm
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.