vrk emit

vrk emit wraps plain text lines into structured JSONL log records with ISO timestamps and log levels.

The problem

A five-stage pipeline prints 10,000 lines of unstructured text. Stage 3 fails. There are no timestamps and no way to tell which stage produced which line. echo "[$(date)] ERROR: ..." adds inconsistent formatting that is hard to grep and impossible to aggregate.

The solution

vrk emit wraps plain text lines into structured JSONL log records with ISO timestamps, log levels, and tags. Pipe any command’s output through it and get machine-parseable logs. --parse-level auto-detects ERROR/WARN/INFO prefixes from existing output. --tag labels records by pipeline stage so you can filter later.

Before and after

Before

echo "[$(date)] INFO: Processing started"
echo "[$(date)] ERROR: Connection failed"
# inconsistent format, hard to parse, no machine-readable structure

After

run-pipeline | vrk emit --tag pipeline --parse-level

Example

run-pipeline 2>&1 | vrk emit --tag deploy --parse-level

Exit codes

Flags

How it works

Basic structured logging

$ echo 'Application started' | vrk emit
{"ts":"2026-03-30T17:48:56.194Z","level":"info","msg":"Application started"}

Every line becomes a JSONL record with an ISO timestamp and log level.

Set log level

$ echo 'Connection refused' | vrk emit --level error
{"ts":"2026-03-30T17:48:56.194Z","level":"error","msg":"Connection refused"}

Levels: debug, info (default), warn, error.

Auto-detect levels from existing output (–parse-level)

$ printf 'Application started\nERROR: database connection failed\nWARNING: cache miss rate high\nProcessing complete\n' | vrk emit --parse-level
{"ts":"2026-03-30T17:48:56.194Z","level":"info","msg":"Application started"}
{"ts":"2026-03-30T17:48:56.195Z","level":"error","msg":"database connection failed"}
{"ts":"2026-03-30T17:48:56.195Z","level":"warn","msg":"cache miss rate high"}
{"ts":"2026-03-30T17:48:56.195Z","level":"info","msg":"Processing complete"}

Recognizes ERROR, WARN, WARNING, INFO, and DEBUG prefixes. Strips the prefix from the message.

Tag records by pipeline stage

$ echo 'Fetching data' | vrk emit --tag fetch
{"ts":"2026-03-30T17:48:56.194Z","level":"info","tag":"fetch","msg":"Fetching data"}

Tags let you filter logs by stage: jq 'select(.tag == "fetch")'.

Combined: tag + parse-level

$ run-deploy.sh 2>&1 | vrk emit --tag deploy --parse-level
{"ts":"...","level":"info","tag":"deploy","msg":"Starting deployment"}
{"ts":"...","level":"error","tag":"deploy","msg":"Container health check failed"}
{"ts":"...","level":"warn","tag":"deploy","msg":"Rolling back to previous version"}

Override message field (–msg)

When stdin contains JSON you want to merge as extra fields:

echo '{"duration_ms":1234,"status":"ok"}' | vrk emit --msg 'Request completed'

Pipeline integration

Structured logging for a multi-stage pipeline

# Each stage tags its own output
cat urls.txt | vrk emit --tag input --level debug | \
  while IFS= read -r record; do
    URL=$(echo "$record" | jq -r '.msg')
    vrk grab "$URL" 2>&1 | vrk emit --tag fetch
  done

Log LLM pipeline results

# Summarize a document and emit structured results
RESULT=$(cat document.md | vrk prompt --system 'Summarize')
echo "$RESULT" | vrk emit --tag summarize --level info

Monitor a batch with mask + emit

# Run a pipeline, redact secrets from output, emit as structured logs
./nightly-pipeline.sh 2>&1 | vrk mask | vrk emit --tag nightly --parse-level

When it fails

Interactive terminal with no input:

$ vrk emit
usage error: emit: no input: pipe text to stdin
$ echo $?
2

Invalid log level:

$ echo 'test' | vrk emit --level critical
usage error: emit: invalid level "critical" (use debug, info, warn, error)
$ echo $?
2