I learned a little trick today that’s going to make my rails development much much easier than before. While I generally like to develop my applications on a local machine – I’ve recently started developing in a live (eg. www.myapp.com) environment.

One thing I was really missing was my faithful server output that I would constantly monitor. I could check every SQL query, which actions were getting triggered, and most importantly (IMO) – the params that were getting passed into my controllers.

Well finally I’ve found a solution (thanks to this link)!

Long story short – all you need to do is SSH into your hosting and then run the following command (from your application directory):

tail -f log/development.log

This will allow you to see the standard development.log in real time. Hope this helps someone as much as it helped me!