Revamping my Server Logs
Jack Baty had a blurb on his blog this week about filtering server logs to use with GoAccess. I have logs running on my various sites but I don't go through the logs too often, mainly because I don't know enough about tooling to make them more readable. I had tried AWStats a year or two ago but ended up dropping it because it made me wonder why people didn't come to my site. It was also a pain to set up.
It's 2025 now and I decided to throw stats back in, but not as a live service. GoAccess was also much easier to get up and running, so thanks Jack for linking to it in your post.
The TUI was nice and I could pop open a log file to look at the overall stats on one of my various domains. I decided to clear out old gzipped log files and rework my logging strategy a little bit. Nginx will rotate the log daily and put each subdomain into it's own directory that I can analyze whenever I want to. I'm keeping those log files for 30 days at a time because I don't get that much traffic and I don't think my disk space will be filled up.
I followed a wonderfully detailed tutorial by Arnaud Rebillout to have a static HTML file generated. It isn't hosted anywhere and I can rsync it down to my machine to look over every now and then. This method has a small persistent database file which prevents duplicate entries, which is nice.
Will I keep it around? Maybe. At least I don't have to do anything manually to generate the report. It'll be something to pop open when curiosity bites rather than a chore to keep up with.
Comments