I built a self-hosted log search tool for my team

#opensource #devops #monitoring #showdev

The backstory

Some time ago I adopted Quickwit at my company. For anyone who hasn't used it: Quickwit is a search engine that runs full-text search directly on object storage (S3 or anything S3-compatible). It decouples compute from storage, so you don't pay to keep big indexes warm to search older data. That model fits logs well.

It worked well for us, but there was a gap. Quickwit is excellent at the search engine part and leaves the rest to you by design: no end-user experience around it, and little access control. We were missing what a team needs day to day, like a usable UI, authentication, and gated ingest.

I started building that layer myself. It turned into Rootprint.

What it is

Besides the basics you'd expect for working with logs (controlling the view, seeing context around a log line, a filters panel, a histogram, severity-aware views), it adds:

User management with Google and GitHub authentication
Authenticated endpoints to ingest data
Cluster stats so you can see what's going on
A user activity overview
Control over sources, and more

It runs on your own infrastructure, and it's Apache-2.0 licensed.

The stack

I wanted it light and fast, so:

Backend: Hono running on Bun
Frontend: Svelte 5 + SvelteKit, with Tailwind and DaisyUI

How it plugs in

Rootprint connects to any Quickwit instance through an environment variable. One caveat: it needs Quickwit 0.9+.

To get started, grab the Docker Compose file and run it:

curl -o docker-compose.yml https://docs.rootprint.io/files/docker-compose.full.yaml
docker compose up -d

The docs cover the rest of the installation options: docs.rootprint.io/install/docker-compose.

Where it's going

I want to build a platform for logs and traces that holds up against anything else out there. Right now I'm focused on the log search experience; traces are on the roadmap but not built yet.

It's still early and pre-1.0, so expect breaking changes between releases.