Using Stern for viewing Kubernetes logs

In my post of yesterday, I introduced you to the kail utility to follow Kubernetes logfiles.

Today, I found a similar utilty called Stern which does the same thing but in a better way.

You can install it as follows (on a mac):

$ brew install stern

There are a number of reasons why I prefer Stern over Kail:

• The output coloring is much better
• You can easily format the output (read: remove the stuff you don’t want to see)
• It shows the names of the pods which are stopped and the ones which are starting

In my case, I’m for example only interested in seeing the pod name:

$ stern staging --template '{{.PodName}} | {{.Message}}'

You can find more information about Stern here.