Logs & monitoring

Once your app is online, the next question is always the same: what is it actually doing right now? Logs are how you find out. Think of them like a diary the app keeps — every time it starts, prints a message, or handles a visitor, it writes a line. When something goes wrong, that diary is the first place to look.

Alaf Server gives you two kinds of diary and one big-picture view:

• Runtime logs — what your app itself prints (startup messages, errors, console.log). This is what you want when the app is crashing or misbehaving.
• Request logs — a line for every web request that reached your app: who asked, for what page, and what answer they got. This is what you want when you're asking "is anyone visiting?" or "why are people getting errors?"
• Analytics — the same request data rolled up into totals and a traffic chart, so you can see trends instead of individual lines.

Open the Logs tab

Runtime logs — the Terminal sub-tab

The Terminal sub-tab is a live view of everything your app prints while it runs — the same output you'd see in a terminal if the app were running on your own machine. If your code calls console.log, throws an error, or prints a startup banner, it shows up here.

A few things worth knowing:

• It streams by itself. When you open the tab it starts tailing new lines automatically. A small green dot and a Stop button tell you it's live; press Stop to freeze it, Start to stream again.
• Search. There's a search box at the top — type to highlight matches, press Enter / Shift+Enter to jump between them.
• Copy, Download, Clear. The buttons on the right let you copy the visible logs to your clipboard, save them to a .txt file, or clear the view.

Request logs — the Server sub-tab

The Server sub-tab (titled HTTP Request Logs) shows one line for every web request that reached your app. Each line tells you:

• the method (GET, POST, …) and the path that was requested,
• the status code the app sent back (green for 2xx, blue for 3xx, amber for 4xx, red for 5xx),
• how long it took (response time in milliseconds),
• the visitor's IP address and country, the bytes in and out, and their browser (user agent).

Like the Terminal, this view is live — new requests appear at the top as they happen.

If your project answers on more than one domain, a domain switcher appears in the header so you can look at one domain's requests at a time.

The bigger picture — analytics on the Overview tab

Individual request lines are great for "what just happened," but for "how's it doing overall" you want the rollup. Open the project's Overview tab and you'll see it:

• Stat cards across the top: Server Requests, Unique IPs, Avg Response (average response time), and Bandwidth Out.
• A Traffic chart showing requests over time.
• A Top Paths list — the pages and endpoints getting the most hits.

This is the same request data as the Server sub-tab, just counted up. Empty at first — it fills in as traffic arrives.

Where to look when something is wrong

A quick map so you don't have to guess:

• The app won't start, or it's crashing → Logs → Terminal. Read the last lines; the error is almost always right there.
• Visitors are getting errors → Logs → Server. Look for red (5xx) lines, note the path, then check the Terminal for the matching stack trace.
• "Is anyone even using this?" → Overview analytics.
• The deployment itself failed (it never went live) → open that deployment from the Deployments tab and read its build log — that's a separate stream from the runtime logs above.

Prefer the terminal?

Everything above is available from the CLI too. First grab your project's ID with alaf server project list, then:

# Runtime (container) logs — what your app prints
alaf server project logs <project-id>              # recent lines
alaf server project logs <project-id> --tail 200   # last 200 lines
alaf server project logs <project-id> -f           # follow / stream live

# HTTP request logs — every web request that hit the app
alaf server project server-logs <project-id>                 # recent entries (JSON)
alaf server project server-logs <project-id> --limit 200     # up to 200 entries
alaf server project server-logs <project-id> --domain yourapp.com   # one domain only
alaf server project server-logs <project-id> -f              # stream live

# A specific deployment's build/run log (grab the id with: alaf server deployment list)
alaf server logs <deployment-id>          # snapshot
alaf server logs <deployment-id> --tail 100
alaf server logs <deployment-id> -f       # stream until the deployment finishes

If something goes wrong

What next?