How to watch logs in real time via Terminal?

This is a basic question - in the movie "The Social Network" there are several scenes when the young Facebook staff is watching the PHP/Apache server logs on in their TERMINAL in real time.

I'm familiar with how to do this in a RUBY/RoR environment - but with a standard LAMP Apache/PHP environment, how to do actively monitor your server's actions in real time? I'm guessing there's an easy way to do this in Terminal.

Solution 1:

maybe they use tail -f on the access log?

Solution 2:

Or even something like logstalgia ;-)

Solution 3:

or install and use multitail to specify filters and coloring :)

Solution 4:

If you are looking for a real-time Apache log viewer and analyzer, I would definitely recommend GoAccess.

http://goaccess.prosoftcorp.com/

You just run it as (no conf needed):

goaccess -f /var/log/apache2/access.log -s -b