# Viewing log messages

If you want to debug a wolkenkit application, you may want to have a look at the log messages of its various processes.

# Getting a snapshot

To get the log messages of an application use the wolkenkit logs command of the CLI. This will get a snapshot of the log messages:

$ wolkenkit logs

# Getting live updates

If you are not only interested in a snapshot, but want to follow the log messages in real-time, you need to additionally provide the --follow flag:

$ wolkenkit logs --follow

# Formatting log messages

Either way, the log messages are nothing but stringified JSON objects, so they can be somewhat hard to read. To format them install flaschenpost by running the following command:

$ npm install -g flaschenpost

Then you can pipe the log messages through flaschenpost and view them as nicely formatted output:

$ wolkenkit logs | flaschenpost-normalize | flaschenpost-uncork