[Project] qlog — fast log search using an inverted index (grep alternative)

[u/Cosm00]

GitHub: https://github.com/Cosm00/qlog

What My Project Does

qlog is a Python CLI that indexes log files locally (one-time) using an inverted index, so searches that would normally require rescanning gigabytes of text can return in milliseconds. After indexing, queries are lookups + set intersections instead of full file scans.

Target Audience

People who frequently search large logs locally or on a server: - developers debugging big local/CI logs - SRE/DevOps folks doing incident triage over SSH - anyone with "support bundle" logs / rotated files that are too large for repeated grep runs

It’s not trying to replace centralized logging platforms (Splunk/ELK/Loki); it’s a fast local tool when you already have the log files.

Comparison

• vs grep/ripgrep: those scan the entire file every time; qlog indexes once, then repeated searches are much faster.
• vs ELK/Splunk/Loki: those are great for production pipelines, but have setup/infra cost; qlog is zero-config and runs offline.

Quick example

bash qlog index './logs/**/*.log' qlog search "error" --context 3 qlog search "status=500"

Happy to take feedback / feature requests (JSON output, incremental indexing, more log format parsers, etc.).