The action journal

Every action that changes state appends a line to journal.jsonl in the data directory: switching a binding, adding or removing an app or server, deploying, backing up, restoring, starting or stopping the gateway.

{"at":"2026-08-08T22:06:55Z","action":"use","app":"web","server":"staging"}
{"at":"2026-08-08T22:07:31Z","action":"deploy","app":"web","server":"staging","detail":"142 files"}

One object per line, so it is tail-able, grep-able and jq-able without a parser:

jq -r 'select(.action=="deploy") | "\(.at) \(.app) -> \(.server)"' journal.jsonl

The five most recent entries also show up at the end of turnout status.

What it never contains

The journal records that something happened, never the values involved. There are no secrets, no logins, no command output and no file contents in it - turnout pass is not journaled at all. Entries carry a timestamp, an action, the entity names and a short note like a file count or a backup name.

That is a design rule, not a filter: nothing in the writing path ever receives a secret to begin with. It means the file is safe to read, attach to a bug report or hand to an assistant.

Size

At 1 MiB the file rotates: the current journal becomes journal.jsonl.1 and a fresh one starts. One previous generation is kept, so the journal cannot grow without bound.

Writing is best-effort - if the journal cannot be written, the command you actually ran still succeeds.