Install tailspin on Ubuntu 24.04

The tailspin command line tool is designed for highlighting log files. This tool reads a log file line by line and applies various regular expressions against each line. In this way, the tailspin tries to find various patterns, such as dates, numbers, and more. This tutorial demonstrates how to install tailspin on Ubuntu 24.04.

Install tailspin

Download the latest release of tailspin from GitHub:

wget -qO tailspin.tar.gz https://github.com/bensadeh/tailspin/releases/latest/download/tailspin-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz

The tar.gz file contains executable. Extract it to /usr/local/bin directory:

sudo tar xf tailspin.tar.gz -C /usr/local/bin

We can check tailspin version using the following command:

tspin --version

Remove unneeded file:

rm -rf tailspin.tar.gz

Testing tailspin

Run the tspin command and provide log file as argument:

tspin /var/log/auth.log

The command will display a highlighted log file, such as:

Uninstall tailspin

To uninstall tailspin, remove the related file:

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/tspin