Skills Expanded

Build a Real-time Log Dashboard with Node and Express

What you'll learn

Build a simple, real-time log dashboard web application using Node, Express, and WebSockets. By building this application, you will gain experience using Node’s file system API for reading and writing files, WebSockets for real-time file updates, and Express for generating web pages.

Table of contents

Setup
15m
  • Set up your local environment for this project. We'll walk you through everything you need to know, including how to install and configure your environment to be able to complete all of the tasks.
Configuring Websockets on the server
20m
  • Configure the WebSockets server.
Adding the Websocket-based log viewer window
30m
  • Add a WebSocket-based log viewer window.
Displaying a log file in real time
35m
  • Using a hard coded file path for the generated log file, display the log file in the log viewer window.
Selecting a log file
30m
  • Implement the file browser feature in order to select a log file dynamically.
Adding settings and configuration
35m
  • Implement the settings feature and add support for a log filter and default directory.

About the author

Tyler Griffiths is an experienced software developer with a passion for writing code that’s easy to test, easy to maintain, and easy to scale. He holds both a Bachelor of Computer Science and an MBA.

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