How to view Serilog log file while it is used by another process?

Question

I am logging my data by Serilog and I am not able to view the log files of the current day because they are used by another process.

I created logger in my program.cs and it is logging data very well

Log.Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
    .ReadFrom.Configuration(Configuration)
    .WriteTo.File(new JsonFormatter(), "Logs/Log.txt", 
            shared:true, rollingInterval: RollingInterval.Day)
    .CreateLogger();

I want to be able to view the logs of the current day

Answer 1

This is answer for getting contents of log file from code, not via FTP, but maybe it can be useful for someone struggling with getting contents from code (like I was).

My original solution for reading the log file was

var path = "...";
var fileBytes = await System.IO.File.ReadAllBytesAsync(path);

return File(fileBytes, "text/plain", fileName);

With this code I was still getting an error that the file is being used by another process. Then I looked into the method ReadAllBytesAsync and there I found this line

new FileStream(path, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read,...)

and I found the parameters FileShare interesting. So I looked, what other possibilities I can put there and I found FileShare.ReadWrite, so I tried it and it worked. Like this

var path = "...";
byte[] result;
  
using (FileStream stream = new FileStream(path, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite))
{
  result = new byte[stream.Length];
  await stream.ReadAsync(result, 0, (int)stream.Length);
}

return File(result, "text/plain", fileName);

When I tried the same (the last code snippet) with FileShare.Read, the error was showing again.

So Serilog has the log file opened for (reading?) and writing and when I want to open the file for reading I have to still allow other processes to write to it and therefore I have to use FileShare.ReadWrite.

Finally I searched if my assumptions were correct and I found this nice explanation for the FileShare parameter - https://stackoverflow.com/a/25098500/6277745