ElfPy - a Tasty Little Script for Downloading Event Log Files on Multiple Platforms

We launched Event Monitoring with Event Log Files last November. Since then, we've had a lot of customers sign up to download their log files.

But recently, one of those customers reached out with a problem. He was a Salesforce administrator on a Windows machine. That meant he had to write code or use one of my stock Bash shell scripts. Most administrators aren't used to writing code and Windows as a platform doesn't support Bash shell scripts without a lot of elbow grease, duct tape, and spit.

To fix this, I created a Python script that runs on multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. You can download the script from my Github repo.  You will need to install Python version 2.7.9 on your machine first; however, that's far easier than trying to get a Bash shell script working with Cygwin.

Why python? Because it's easy to learn, it's easy to read, it has incredible library support, and most importantly, it supports multiple platforms including some I haven't even heard of!

To run the script, open a terminal (or cmd on Windows) and type:

python elf.py

or if you have multiple versions of Python, including 2.7.9, installed already:

python2.7 elf.py

The script is very simple and takes four prompts:

1. Username
2. Password (hidden)
3. Date range
4. Download directory

Beyond that, it's as easy as running the script from a terminal or command prompt and you're ready to start downloading Event Log Files on Mac, Linux, or Windows.