Embedded Device Logger
The Embedded Device Logger is a Visual Studio Code extension that can connect to your devices over SSH, tail their logs, and help you analyze the data with loglevel colorization, quick filters, custom keywords highlights and filtered export. It provides also an SFTP client, SSH terminals and one-off SSH commands to help you develop, debug and maintain your Linux-based devices.
- SFTP Panel view and SSH terminal:
If you like the extension, please rate it. We welcome issue reports and feature requests.
Key Features
- Stream device logs over SSH with real-time log-level parsing and colorization.
- Search, filter, bookmark, and export the exact lines you need.
- Highlight up to 10 keywords per panel to spot critical events fast.
- Run one-off SSH commands and optionally upload a script to
/tmp, chmod 777 it, and execute it after the command.
- Open SSH terminals, including command panels that can optionally re-run after reconnecting and run uploaded scripts.
- Open device URLs in an external browser or in VS Code's embedded browser.
- Optionally ping all configured devices, with manual or scheduled checks and reachability dots in the Devices view.
- Browse files with the built-in SFTP explorer, including quick search,
find/grep result views, and keyboard shortcuts.
- Assign per-device colors to make tabs and device lists easier to scan.
- Organize devices with collapsible groups in the Embedded Devices view.
- Choose the extension UI language from English, Spanish, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Portuguese (Brazil), Turkish, Polish, Czech, or Hungarian, following VS Code's display language by default and falling back to English for missing strings.
- Secure by default: passwords and key passphrases live in VS Code Secret Storage.
- Privacy focused. No telemetry. Everything runs locally.
Getting started
- Install the extension (see below).
- Open the Embedded Logger view from the Activity Bar (terminal icon).
- Open the configuration with the edit icon (🖍) to launch the Device Manager, add your devices and start streaming logs.
For the full setup and configuration reference, see the Detailed Usage and Configuration guide.
Installation
- From the VS Code Extensions view, search for Embedded Device Logger (Publisher: Scallant),
- or from Quick Open (Ctrl/Cmd+P):
ext install Scallant.embedded-device-logger,
- or from a terminal:
code --install-extension Scallant.embedded-device-logger.
Visit the Marketplace page for more details.
Motivation behind the development of this VSCode Extension
When you develop, debug, or audit software for embedded Linux devices, logs are everything.
They tell you what happened, when it happened, and often why it happened.
Yet in practice, working with logs on embedded systems is still surprisingly awkward.
Most of us rely on:
- SSH into the device
- Running
tail -f, journalctl, or custom scripts
- Copy-pasting outputs
- Repeating the same commands again and again
And while VS Code has become the de-facto development environment for many engineers, log inspection still lives mostly outside the editor.
I tried to find a VS Code extension that was:
- Fast
- Simple
- Designed for embedded Linux, not servers
- Capable of real-time and offline log analysis
I couldn’t find one that fully fit that workflow.
So I built it.
More about this story at Medium Article
For developers
Want to build from source or contribute? npm run compile now type-checks the extension and bundles the extension host into out/extension.js, while npm run watch keeps that bundled output up to date during development. See the Developer Setup and Workflow for packaging, local installs, and contribution guidelines. The project is open to pull requests. Please, check the CONTRIBUTING guide and the Code Architecture Overview before submitting.
