There are a couple of things that could be going wrong.
First, have you installed the gem? To use Conductor with your Rails project, you need to install the accompanying rails-conductor gem—check out Getting Started for a step-by-step walkthrough.
Next make sure you’ve cleared your existing log files after installing the gem. If there’s any lingering plain text log data in your log files, Conductor will be unable to open them since it’s expecting the logs to contain XML. To clear your log files, run rake log:clear in your Rails app directory.
If you’re still having trouble, get in touch with me via one of the methods on the Support page and I’ll help you troubleshoot. If you send me a copy of your log file I can try to reproduce the problem on my end.
Rails outputs log data in plain text and Conductor needs the log data to be structured in order to be easily machine-parseable. In the early stages of its development Conductor parsed the plain text log using regular expressions, but it quickly became intractable as the feature set evolved and it ultimately wasn’t extensible enough of a solution.
The gem specification for the rails-conductor gem includes a dependency for the version of Rails with which it interoperates, so you can simply leave the version unspecified in your gemfile and Bundler will install the correct version for you.
If for some reason you’re installing the gem manually, you need to use the version of the gem that corresponds with the version of Rails you are using. Since the gem integrates tightly with Rails in order to output log data as XML rather than plain text, the gem is versioned in step with the version of Rails it works with—for example, if you’re using Rails 4.1.6 then you need version 4.1.6 of the gem.
Unfortunately, logging is not full decoupled in the Rails source and therefore the gem has to integrate tightly with Rails in order to output log data as XML rather than plain text. That integration includes overriding a few parts of Rails and since Conductor is still a relatively new app I’m not confident enough that there might not be unforeseen problems in production. If you do use it in production, do so at your own risk. However, support for production logs is something I’m considering adding in the future.
For the same reason, use with tests is highly discouraged.
Conductor works with all versions of Rails 4, 5, and 6. If you’re using Rails 3 or earlier, contact me and I can look into getting the gem ported to the version of Rails you’re using.
Conductor is currently compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina and macOS 11 Big Sur. The current and previous versions of macOS are always officially supported, but support for earlier versions is not guaranteed as certain required functionality may not exist in progressively older versions of the macOS SDKs. If you’re using an earlier version of macOS then Conductor will probably work fine, but I haven’t tested it extensively with anything below Catalina so I can’t guarantee you won’t run into bugs.