[Linux] Journal.

I wanted an easy way to monitor web visit statistics on my low traffic website. I looked around and found AWStats and Webalizer. Here’s a comparion of different log analyers, mind it’s hosted by AWStats. Nonetheless AWStats seems to be preferred from user posts on forums for it is said to be more accurate and offers more features.

awstats is available as a debian package, however the file structure is different from the default and the difference is not documented so I had a bit of searching to do before I could configure it. I proceeded as follows:

$ mv /usr/share/doc/awstats/examples/ /usr/local/awstats
$ cd /usr/local/awstats
$ gunzip awstats.model.conf.gz
$ mkdir wwwroot; mkdir wwwroot/cgi-bin
$ mv awstats.model.conf wwwroot/cgi-bin
$ ./awstats_configure.pl

The configure script modifies httpd.conf to include Alias and directives for awstats directories. However the directories are not where they should be. So we can either change these Aliases in httpd.conf to point to what the directories actually exist, or we could link it to where it should be. I choose the latter.

$ ln -s /usr/local/awstats/css/ wwwroot/
$ ln -s /usr/share/awstats/* wwwroot/
$ ln -s /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl wwwroot/cgi-bin/
$ chown -R --dereference www-data:www-data wwwroot
$ chown -R www-data:www-data /var/lib/awstats/
$ chown root:www-data /var/log/apache/access.log

Since it’s symlinked, we need to allow symlinks in the wwwroot directive in the apache config file. Optionally if we want to access it remotely from the web, we also need to configure htaccess for awstats.

<Directory "/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot">
    Options FollowSymLinks # add this

    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all

    # include this to enable password protected htaccess
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Password Required"
    AuthUserFile /usr/local/apache/passwd/passwords
    Require user anniec
<Directory>

Restart apache,

$ apachectl graceful

One more thing about permissions. The apache logfile is archived and recreated every week, so in order to allow awstats to have read access to the fresh log file we need to modify the log rotation script,

/var/log/apache/*.log {
...
# change "create 640 root admin" to
create 640 root www-data

Now we finally come to configuring awstats in awstats.frasco.hopto.org.conf, substitute frasco.hopto.org with your domain name.

LogFile="/var/log/apache/access.log"
# the following setting parses all logs including old gzipped archive logs
#LogFile="/usr/local/awstats/logresolvemerge.pl /var/log/apache/access.log* |"
LogType=W
LogFormat=1
SiteDomain="frasco.hopto.org"
DNSLookup=1
DirData="/var/lib/awstats"
AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=1 # need to make DirData writable by www-data if set to 1
AllowAccessFromWebToAuthenticatedUsersOnly=1 # need to configure .htaccess  if set to 1
AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=1

The debian package also comes with a cron file, but need to be modified to point to the right awstats.conf file, e.g.

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * www-data /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=frasco.hopto.org -update >/dev/null

or if you have multiple config files:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * www-data /usr/local/awstats/awstats_updateall.pl now -update >/dev/null

Try running it manually:

$ /usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=frasco.hopto.org

If all goes well we should be able to access it from the browser on http://localhost/awstats/awstats.pl?config=frasco.hopto.org.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 5th, 2004 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Web publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.