Streaming journald logs to the browser with SSE

I got tired of SSHing into the box every time I shipped something, just to watch the logs come up. So I wanted a page in the admin panel where the lines scroll past as they happen, no dashboard, no Grafana, just the raw tail. The surprising part was how little I had to build for it, most of the pieces were already sitting on the server waiting for me to connect them. Here's the whole idea. The app writes JSON to stdout, systemd grabs that stdout and drops every line into the journal, and journalctl can follow the journal and hand the lines back live. All three of those already exist on an Ubuntu box. So the "live log viewer" is really just me spawning journalctl on the server and piping its output to the browser over an EventSource , which is a lot less code than it sounds like. journald is boring and well understood. SSE is boring and well understood (it's been in browsers since about 2011). Nobody gets excited about either one on its own. But snap the two together and you get a real-time log tail with no agent, no log shipper, no vendor, and nothing new to keep alive. Two defaults meeting each other and pretending to be a feature. Systemd thing People have opinions about systemd. Some of them are that you should avoid every part of it that you can, run your own supervisor, ship logs somewhere with your own daemon, and treat journald as a thing to route around. That's a fine hobby if you have the time for it. I don't. The box boots, systemd starts my unit, and when the unit writes to stdout the line ends up in the journal without me configuring anything. Being a purist here costs real hours and buys me a philosophy. Being pragmatic costs nothing and buys me a log tail. So this is the pragmatic path. If you're on a distro where journald is the default (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, most of them now) the setup below is basically free. Getting logs into the journal Here is the part most people overcomplicate. You do not "set up journald". You do not open a socket to it or p