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Logmailer is a simple daemon that monitors a named pipe (FIFO) for log
entries and emails them to the system administrator.  Your syslog daemon
can be configured to write high priority log entries to this named pipe,
ensuring that you quickly see and react to critical events.

Logmailer is written to be robust and gracefully handles the numerous edge
cases that arise when using named pipes.  It also aggregates multiple
back-to-back log messages in a single email to avoid sending a flood
of emails.


USING LOGMAILER

Usage: logmailer [OPTIONS] FIFO_PATH

Options:
	-r RECIPIENT	Email address where log messages should be sent
			(default: root).
	-m MIN_WAIT	Minimum number of seconds of inactivity before
			sending an email (see below) (default: 5).
	-M MAX_WAIT	Maximum number of seconds a log entry may be queued
			before being emailed (see below) (default: 60).
	-s SUBJECT	Subject for emails (see below).
	-f		Don't daemonize.
	-u USER		Run as given user.
	-g GROUP	Run as given group (default: primary group of USER).
	-p PIDFILE	After daemonizing, write PID to this file.

FIFO_PATH must exist before starting logmailer.  You can create it with
the mkfifo command (note: the debian init script does this for you).

To prevent a flood of email messages, logmailer buffers log messages
and only emails them once MIN_WAIT_TIME seconds of inactivity have
passed, OR once a message has been buffered for MAX_WAIT_TIME seconds.
(It may send messages sooner if the buffer fills up.)

SUBJECT may contain the following escape sequences:

	%h	Replaced with hostname.
	%c	Replaced with number of log entries in email.
	%%	Replaced with literal '%'.

Any other two character sequence starting with a % is ignored
(i.e. removed from the Subject line).

Once logmailer is running, you can configure your syslog daemon to write
log messages to the named pipe.  For example, the following rsyslog.conf
entry sends log messages of priority ALERT or higher to a named pipe:

	*.alert		|/var/run/logmailer.pipe


REQUIREMENTS

To build logmailer, you need make and a C++ compiler (e.g. GCC).

To run logmailer, you need the sendmail binary installed, and a syslog daemon
that supports writing to a named pipe (e.g. rsyslog).


HOW TO BUILD

Run 'make' and 'make install'.


CURRENT STATUS

Logmailer is a very short and simple program.  I consider it stable and
feature complete.  I'll fix bugs if any arise but do not plan on adding
new features.  I have released logmailer in case it's useful to someone
else, but I can't guarantee I'll develop or support it in any way.


DEBIAN PACKAGING

Debian packaging, complete with an init script, can be found in the
'debian' branch of this Git repository.  The package is built using
git-buildpackage as follows:

	1. Check out the debian branch: `git checkout debian`
	2. Build the package: `git-buildpackage -uc -us`

By default, the logmailer Debian package creates and uses
/var/run/logmailer.pipe as its FIFO.  To change this, edit
the self-documenting /etc/default/logmailer configuration file.


LEGALESE

Copyright (C) 2014 Andrew Ayer <[email protected]>
Licensed under the MIT/X11 license (see COPYING for details)