Every developer eventually faces the same pain: digging through massive log files. Whether you’re debugging, monitoring, or investigating issues, logs are a goldmine of information — but they can be overwhelming to search and navigate.

Most of us fall back to:

opening logs in a text editor (slow, clunky, not scalable), or
setting up enterprise-grade tools like Splunk (powerful but overkill for local work).

That’s why I built Logster — a lightweight, open-source desktop application for searching and browsing logs.

✨ Why Logster?

I was inspired by tools like glogg and Splunk. Both are useful, but I wanted something in the middle:

Lightweight enough to run locally without complex setup
Flexible enough to handle multiple files
Smart enough to support timestamp-based searches and custom formats

That’s the motivation behind Logster.

🔧 Features

Here’s what Logster can do today:

📂 Index and search log files within a selected folder
⏱ Search by timestamps for precise log navigation
🛠 Define custom date/time formats
📑 Add support for custom file extensions
👀 View log file contents directly in the app
📋 Copy log content with ease
🔍 Toggle log levels (INFO, WARN, ERROR, etc.) for debugging

🚀 Getting Started

Logster is a Java desktop app. To run it:

Download the zip from release page https://github.com/vivekg13186/logster/releases

Make sure you have Java Development Kit (JDK) 24 or later installed.
Run the command file
Start exploring logs!
Go to File → Index Folder to select a log directory.
Use date range search for timestamp filtering.
Add custom extensions and formats under File → Settings.
Toggle log levels for debugging.

🛠 Roadmap

Some ideas I’m exploring for future releases:

Real-time streaming (tail logs inside the app)
Visualization of log trends over time
Saved searches and filters
Optimizations for very large log files

💡 Contributing

Logster is open source, and contributions are very welcome! 🎉

👉 Repo: github.com/vivekg13186/logster

You can help by:

Submitting bug reports or feature requests
Adding support for new formats/extensions
Improving the UI/UX

Check out the issues tab for good first issues!

Search view

File view

Settings

If this sounds useful to you, give it a try — and if you like it, don’t forget to ⭐ star the repo. Feedback is always welcome!

👉 Logster on GitHub

I built Logster: a desktop app for searching logs without Splunk