Grits

A simple line-text formatter that makes it simple to parse, filter, and format live logs turning noise into meaningful insights.

An example of Grits in action: the left pane shows Grits being applied, and the right pane displays the raw logs.

• Installation
• Documentation
• Contributing
• Donating
• FAQ

At its core, grits applies regular expressions with named captures to input lines. These captures are then available as variables (a.k.a. anchors) which can then be used in a grits template string. The template string supports text-alignment, colorization, as well as other attributes you'd expect using ANSI escape sequences.

The following example demonstrates how to apply grits to tcpdump to extract an output line's timestamp (ts) and a packet's source (src) and destination (dst) IP address:

tcpdump -nn | grits -- \
  -p '^(?<ts>[^ ]+)' \
  -p 'IP\w? (?<src>[^ ]+)' \
  -p '> (?<dst>[^ ]+):' \
  -t '[{(cyan|bold):ts}] {(green|underlined):"src"}={(lalign(45)):src} {(yellow|underlined):"dst"}={dst}'

The top pane in the above screenshot is the raw output of tcpdump while the bottom pane shows the output being piped into grits.

Installation

crates.io

cargo install grits

cURL

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/solidiquis/grits/releases/download/v0.3.0/grits-installer.sh | sh

Powershell

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "irm https://github.com/solidiquis/grits/releases/download/v0.3.0/grits-installer.ps1 | iex"

Manual installation

Check the releases page for prebuilt binaries.

Documentation

The documentation for grits can be found here. It is also available in the CLI via --help.

Contributing

All well-intentioned forms of contributions are welcome.

Donating

If you like this tool, please consider buying me a coffee. Much appreciated!

FAQ

• Q: Have you heard of lnav? Why should I use grits over lnav?

• A: I have heard of lnav but I haven't used it. Users are encouraged to use both to see what best fits their needs.

• Q: Why is this called grits?

• A: I was really craving shrimp & grits while writing this on a plane going to South Korea. Also, checkout my Spotify playlist called Melancholy with a side of Grits.