Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Sitecore Latest Log File in One Click

When you are working with Sitecore as developer or quality engineer, you often need to look at log files. There are few ways to do it: you can open files from your Data\Logs\ folder, you can use Log Viewer, you can use Log4Net Dashboard or even you can use any application that works with Log4Net. But for all this situations you need to do many clicks. That is why I decided to write Google Chrome extension that allows to get latest log file in browser in one click.

Google Chrome has limitations for extensions, for example you are not able to read from disk. But you can use some workarounds, for example NPAPI Plugins. It makes some limitation on extension, you can’t upload it to Chrome Web Store and you should install it as unpacked extension.

But it is not problem at all, it just makes installation of extension longer.

Here are steps that you should do:

1) Download extension folder from GitHub.

2) Visit chrome://extensions in your browser (or open up the Chrome menu by clicking the icon to the far right of the Omnibox:  The menu's icon is three horizontal bars.. and select Extensions under the Tools menu to get to the same place).

3) Ensure that the Developer mode checkbox in the top right-hand corner is checked.

4) Click Load unpacked extension… to pop up a file-selection dialog.

5) Navigate to the directory in which you downloaded files from step 1, and select it.

Enjoy getting latest log file in one click!

Screenshot 2014-11-12 15.59.31

Also you are able to configure wwwroot folder where your Sitecore environments live:

Screenshot 2014-11-12 16.02.00

P.S. Bonus: extension also works in Opera, however I do not know who uses Opera for development or testing.