As a developer, there may be times when you need to monitor what is happening on an Apache server as live HTTP requests are coming in from a web page. In a UNIX environment, you can actually accomplish this quite painlessly through the command line, using the tail and grep commands. Tail is a command which outputs the last part of a file and the grep utility is used for pattern matching.

First, you will want to locate your Apache logs and cd into that directory. If you are running a local server through MAMP, you can most likely find them in the application folder.

cd /Applications/MAMP/logs

If you are running the Apache server that is preinstalled on OS X, you should be able to find them from the var folder in the root directory.

cd /var/log/apache2

Once you’ve found where your log files are located, you can monitor them using the tail command, as mentioned above. From the directory where the log files live, run the following command:

tail -f apache_access.log

The -f flag makes the tail command output additional data as it is appended to the log. Tail can also be piped through grep to pattern match and filter your output results. This way you won’t get such a potentially large output and will be able to pinpoint what you are looking for more easily.

tail -f apache_access.log | grep -i someusefulpattern

The -i flag in the above grep command will ignore case distinctions in both the pattern and the input files. You can also run the manual from the command line for a full list of options on each utility and use whatever variation best suits your scenario.

So there you have it – with just a short, one line command in your Terminal, you can easily monitor the HTTP requests on your Apache web server as they are happening.