lnav Is A Nice Log Viewer

I was tailing Kubernetes logs with kubectl and hit an issue when trying to scroll up and search. Piping to less doesn’t stream, so you miss new output. Using less +F follows the stream, but you have to hit Ctrl+C before you can scroll or search. It’s clunky.

Then I found lnav. It handles streaming log output natively, so you can pipe kubectl logs straight into it:

k logs deploy/my-service -n my-namespace -f | lnav

New lines appear in real time and you can scroll up, search, filter, all without stopping the stream. It also auto-detects common log formats, highlights errors, and lets you run SQL queries against your logs.

If you’re spending any amount of time reading logs in a terminal, lnav is worth the install.