nxadm/tail provides a Go library that emulates the features of the BSD tail program. The library comes with full support for truncation/move detection as it is designed to work with log rotation tools. The library works on all operating systems supported by Go, including POSIX systems like Linux, *BSD, MacOS, and MS Windows. Go 1.12 is the oldest compiler release supported.

A simple example:

// Create a tail
t, err := tail.TailFile(
	"/var/log/nginx.log", tail.Config{Follow: true, ReOpen: true})
if err != nil {
    panic(err)
}

// Print the text of each received line
for line := range t.Lines {
    fmt.Println(line.Text)
}

See API documentation.

go get github.com/nxadm/tail/...

This project is an active, drop-in replacement for the abandoned Go tail library at hpcloud. Next to addressing open issues/PRs of the original project, nxadm/tail continues the development by keeping up to date with the Go toolchain (e.g. go modules) and dependencies, completing the documentation, adding features and fixing bugs.

Examples, e.g. used to debug an issue, are kept in the examples directory.