When running a webserver your log files can rapidly fill with information about the visitors to your site, Webalizer can help.

Your webserver’s log files can be a mine of useful information with regards to the users visiting your website. Unfortunately, reading this information from the logs isn’t the simplest of tasks. To make this resource more useful there are tools available that look through the log files and generate statistics from them. Webalizer is one of these tools: it runs at regular intervals and creates statistics from your website logs as well as charts of usage. It is free and open source, being licensed under the GNU GPL.

How do I install Webalizer?

***For infomation on installing Webalizer on Debian & Ubuntu, read yesterdays post on the 100TB blog. 

Red Hat & CentOS

Installing Webalizer in Red Hat and CentOS is pretty straightforward as it is in the base repositories. So the install is as simple as the following command:

yum install webalizer

If you are using Apache, in its default configuration then your task of installing Webalizer is complete. Webalizer comes pre-configured to use Apache’s default log file for its data source, and then output its information to /var/www/usage with Apache configured to serve that directory as a subdirectory of the main website under /usage. To test this, simply run the following command:

webalizer

If all has worked correctly, Webalizer should have placed the various files that it creates in the /var/www/usage directory. If so, then you are done and the default cron task that is created through the installation should see you fine with keeping the statistics up to date.

 

100TB offers arround the clock technical support as a resource to help whenever you need answers. 

 

Apache with Virtualhost

If, on the other hand, you are using Apache with Virtualhosts then you have some work ahead of you, the first thing needing to be done is to create configuration files for each of your Virtualhosts. For this I’d suggest making a directory for these files then making copies of the webalizer.conf file in there for each Virtualhost domain you are running:

mkdir /etc/webalizer

cp /etc/webalizer.conf /etc/webalizer/webalizer.yourdomain.com.conf

The above commands create the webalizer config directory and then adds a config file. Note that you need to change yourdomain.com for the domain that you are using webalizer on. The next thing you need to do is edit the new configuration file to fit your configuration. For the following example we will be using a server configured to store log files in /var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com_access.log and the website files in the /var/www/yourdomain.com directory. The configuration file will need editing – I’m going to use nano in this example, but other text editors are available.

nano /etc/webalizer/webalizer.yourdomain.com.conf

The main lines to change are the LogFile line and the OutputDir line, so find those and edit them to match your configuration.

LogFile /var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com_access.log

OutputDir /var/www/yourdomain.com/webalizer

You can now save and exit this file. To avoid having to create a lot of extra configuration files for Apache, I’m using a subdirectory within the website directory for the Webalizer output. This means that it would be accessible from the web as below:

http://yourdomain.com/webalizer

The next step is to populate the directory for which we’ll need to run Webalizer:

webalizer -c /etc/webalizer/webalizer.yourdomain.com.conf

The -c flag tells Webalizer to use the specified configuration file rather than its default, so it should process the new configuration file and create the correct output. If this has worked properly then you should see the files in the directory you uses for the OutputDir.

 

Finalizing Webalizer

The last step is to create the cron task required to generate the webalizer output. This is where putting the configuration all within one directory will come in handy as we can create a simple BASH script to process the configuration files. Edit the Webalizer cron task created when Webalizer was installed and then use it to continue:

nano /etc/cron.daily/00webalizer

Remove all the content of this and then paste in the following code:

#!/bin/bash

# Update website statistics for Virtualhosts using /etc/webalizer directory

for i in /etc/webalizer/*.conf; do

  [ -f $i ] || continue;

  /usr/bin/webalizer -c ${i} -Q

done;