What is gunsole?
Gunsole is a desktop log viewer. You install it, it runs a local HTTP server on port 17655, and your apps send structured logs to it via a lightweight SDK.
That’s the whole pitch.
console.log doesn’t scale. It’s fine when you have 5 logs. It’s not fine when you have 5,000, across 3 services, and you need to find the one request that broke.
Cloud logging services (Datadog, LogRocket, etc.) are powerful but they cost money, require accounts, send your data to someone else’s servers, and come with a pile of configuration you don’t need during development.
Gunsole sits in between. It’s a real log viewer — with filtering, bucketing, tagging, search — but it runs entirely on your machine. No account. No monthly bill. No data leaving localhost.
The parts
Section titled “The parts”Desktop app — a Tauri application (Rust backend, React frontend). Receives logs, stores them in SQLite, displays them in a virtualized table with real-time streaming. Runs on macOS, Windows, Linux.
SDK — currently JavaScript/TypeScript (npm: gunsole-js). Collects logs, batches them, gzip-compresses, and sends them to the desktop app. Handles retries and never crashes your app.
HTTP API — the desktop app exposes a REST API on localhost:17655 for querying logs programmatically. It also runs an MCP server so AI agents can read your logs.
What it is not
Section titled “What it is not”- Not a production monitoring tool (use Datadog for that)
- Not an APM (no metrics, no traces visualization yet)
- Not a cloud service (nothing leaves your machine)
- Not trying to replace your production logging pipeline
It’s a development tool. It makes the “what the hell is happening in my app” question answerable without grepping through terminal output.