Embedded Device Logger

A Visual Studio Code extension that connects to embedded Linux devices over SSH, tails their logs, and displays them with loglevel colorization, filtering presets, custom keywords highlighting and filtered export.

Features

• Activity Bar view listing configured devices.
• Real-time log streaming over SSH using a configurable command (default: tail -F /var/log/syslog).
• Log level parsing, filtering, and colorization inside a Webview panel per device.
• Highlight up to 10 custom keywords with color-coded, bold, underlined text in both live and imported logs.
• Find text inside live or imported logs with Ctrl/Cmd+F, including next/previous navigation.
• Reconnect closed SSH sessions directly from the log panel and automatically mark the log when a device closes a session.
• Saved filter presets stored per device.
• Export currently visible (filtered) logs to a file.
• Open any log files and filter them with the same interface.
• SSH passwords are stored securely with VS Code Secret Storage.
• Privacy focused. No telemetry. Everything runs locally.
• Built with security in mind.

Configuration

Add devices in your VS Code settings under embeddedLogger.devices:

"embeddedLogger.maxLinesPerTab": 100000,
"embeddedLogger.devices": [
  {
    "id": "deviceA",
    "name": "Device A",
    "host": "192.168.1.10",
    "port": 22,
    "username": "root",
    "logCommand": "tail -F /var/log/syslog"
  }
]

If no password is stored yet, the extension prompts for it when connecting and saves it locally and securely.

• Control memory usage by capping retained lines per log tab with embeddedLogger.maxLinesPerTab (default: 100000).

Notes

• Colorization of lines are done based on the loglevel (DEBUG, INFO, ERROR, etc). If these keys are not present in the log, no colorization will be applied.
• Presets are stored per-device in the workspace state using the key embeddedLogger.presets.<deviceId>.
• Exports only include log lines currently visible after applying filters.
• When an SSH session closes, the log view appends --- SSH session closed on <timestamp> and offers a Reconnect button next to the status text to restart streaming.
• Click the search icon in the Embedded Logger devices view to add up to ten highlight rows, each with its own colour and editable keyword that updates live and imported logs instantly.
• Use the Open Local Log File title button in the Embedded Logger devices view (or run the command with the same name) to select a .log or .txt file from your machine. The chosen file is loaded into the log viewer so you can reuse filtering, presets, export filtered logs and highlights just like a live connection.

Share Activity Bar with other extensions

The Embedded Device Logger extension supports sharing the VSCode Activity Bar with other extensions. To merge an extension into the Activity Bar, simply select its icon from the Side Bar, then drag and drop it into your desired position within the Activity Bar.

In the example, the other extensions (from other publishers) are:

• elcamilet.ssh-connect
• ikoamu.side-clipboard

Installation

• From VSCode: Search for Embedded Device Logger (Publisher: Scallant, Author: A. Scillato).
• From VSCode Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Scallant.embedded-device-logger

For Developers

Source Code

• See Source Code
• License: MIT

Source Code Documentation

• See Documentation

Running The Extension Locally

1. Clone the repository
2. Run npm install to install dependencies.
3. Run npm run compile to build the TypeScript.
4. Press F5 in VS Code to launch the extension development host and open the Embedded Logger view.

Package Generation

• Requires: npm install -g @vscode/vsce
• Run: vsce package to generate vsix file to be installed into VSCode
• Install locally on VSCode: code --install-extension embedded-device-logger-0.5.0.vsix

Clean and re-compile

• clear; rm -rf node_modules; rm -rf out; rm *.vsix; npm install; npm run compile; vsce package
• code --install-extension embedded-device-logger-0.5.0.vsix

Generating Source Code Documentation

1. Ensure Doxygen is available locally (sudo apt-get install doxygen).
2. From the repository root, run doxygen Doxyfile to build the documentation into docs/html.
3. Open docs/html/index.html in a browser to review the generated API reference.