TL;DR: logbox is an open-source tool that pipes dev server logs to a local sqlite db with `<your-dev-server-cmd> | logbox collect`. Give Claude Code access by running `claude mcp add logbox -- logbox serve`.

I used to copy & paste logs into Claude Code when manually testing my server in dev. I wanted to give it its own verification loop.

I initially tried having it boot the server itself and follow the logs. It was good at knowing if the server booted properly, but it capped out and missed details when the logs started flowing in.

I also tried piping the logs to a local file and telling Claude to read them from there. It worked, but became annoying once we had multiple services or wanted to reference past dev server sessions.

So I built logbox for ourselves at Struct and decided to open-source it. It’s a simple Rust CLI that pipes logs into a local SQLite db with an MCP server that gives coding agents the ability to search them.

Once it could reliably monitor the dev server logs totally autonomously after testing its changes, I stopped needing to fish for log snippets and keep nudging it to get a manual test working end-to-end.

Everything stays local. `logbox serve` is an stdio MCP server and it just works with the local SQLite db.