Sift — Intelligent Log Aggregator for Local Development

Sift is the htop of local development logging. It aggregates, parses, categorizes, and presents logs from all your running services in a single, beautiful, interactive terminal interface — so you can find what matters without scrolling through five terminal tabs.

Core Philosophy:

• Aggregate — One pane, all services. No more tab-switching.
• Parse — Understands log levels, timestamps, service names, and request IDs automatically.
• Correlate — Traces a single request across multiple services (when trace IDs are present).
• Filter — Search, filter by service, level, or time — in real-time.
• Pause — Spacebar pauses the display; logs keep buffering in the background.

Installation

npm install -g sift-logs

Requires Node.js 18+.

Quick Start

Run services directly

From a project with a package.json, Sift auto-detects runnable services and lets you pick which ones to run (multi-select, with the option to edit a command or add your own):

sift run

Sift remembers your selection per project — the next sift run in that directory offers to reuse it. Guessed commands (e.g. a Celery/Sidekiq worker) are detected but left unchecked by default since they often need project-specific arguments.

CLI Commands

| Command | Description | | ----------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------- | | sift run | Detect services from package.json and aggregate logs. | | sift run --file - | Read logs from stdin. | | sift run --session-name <name> | Name the saved session. | | sift run --no-save | Run without persisting the session. | | sift replay --session yesterday | Replay a past session in the UI. | | sift diff session1 session2 | Compare two persisted sessions. | | sift config init | Create a sift.config.json file. | | sift --version | Show version. |

Log persistence

Every sift run session is saved to a local SQLite database at ~/.config/sift/sift.db (unless you pass --no-save). Replay previous sessions or compare two runs:

sift replay --session yesterday
sift diff session1 session2

Session identifiers can be a name, id, or alias (last, today, yesterday).

Keyboard Shortcuts

| Key | Action | | ------------------- | ----------------------------------------------- | | ↑ / ↓ | Scroll logs (1 line) | | PgUp / PgDn | Scroll (10 lines) | | Home / End | Jump to first / last log | | Space | Pause / resume stream | | / | Open search overlay | | n / N | Next / previous search match | | e | Filter errors | | w | Filter warnings | | i | Filter info | | a | Show all levels / services | | s then 1-9 | Toggle service visibility (hide/show) | | 1 … 9 | Show only that service (press again for all) | | Enter | Expand multi-line log / show trace | | Backspace / Esc | Close overlay / return to full view | | d | Show detail view for selected log | | c | Copy selected log to clipboard | | r | Restart selected service | | l | Toggle line wrapping | | t | Toggle timestamps | | h / ? | Show help overlay | | q / Ctrl+C | Quit Sift |

Supported Log Formats

• Node.js / console (console.log, console.error, console.warn)
• Winston (JSON and human-readable transports)
• Pino (structured JSON logs)
• Express / Morgan (HTTP access logs)
• Next.js (dev server, build, and route handler output)
• JSON structured logs, bracketed logs ([INFO] message), prefixed logs (ERROR: message), logfmt (key=value), and Docker / Docker Compose prefixed logs
• Generic plain text with best-effort timestamp/level detection

Coming soon: Python, Go, and Rust support.

Metrics Dashboard

Sift extracts live metrics from HTTP access logs while you work:

• Request rate — requests per minute per service
• Error rate — rolling error ratio shown as a status-bar sparkline
• Average response time — per service, when response times are present in logs
• Health indicators — green / yellow / red dot per service based on error ratio

No configuration is required. Pipe any service that emits HTTP access logs and the metrics appear automatically.

Platform Support

• macOS: full support
• Linux: full support
• Windows: sql.js has no native build step, so native Windows should now work without WSL2 (untested — WSL2 remains a fallback if you hit issues)

Marketing Website

The public-facing website lives in site/. It is a Vite + React + TypeScript single-page app with a warm editorial design system, built to explain Sift and drive adoption.

cd site
npm install
npm run dev      # local development
npm run build    # static export to site/dist
npm run preview  # preview the production build

Deploys are handled by .github/workflows/site.yml to GitHub Pages whenever main changes under site/. To use it, enable Pages in the repository settings and set the source to GitHub Actions.

License

MIT © Abdul-Qudus Rufai