Things you didn't know about Awstats

Awstats is the definitive Apache log "processor" (they mean -- summarizeri) in the LAMPii world, by simple lack of competitioniii. I don't know whether everyone uses it, but I do know it is powerful and flexible enough to be pretty much universally useful.

But did you know it has a config file ? Something like

/home/?user?/tmp/awstats/awstats.?tld?.conf

depending on your installation ? Ever read that thing ?

Let's read from mine together.

# Use SkipFiles to ignore access to URLs that match one of following entries.

# You can, with this option, add a list of not important frame pages (like

# menus, etc...) to exclude them from statistics.

# For example, to ignore a whole directory tree, just add "directorytoignore",

# to ignore "users" pages in your stats, you can add "/~".

# The oposite parameter of "SkipFiles" is "OnlyFiles".

# Note: This parameter is not case sensitive.

# Note: Use space between each value and do not remove default values.

# Note: xxx$ means URL ending with xxx.

# Example: "robots.txt$ favicon.ico$ badpage.html /~"

# Default: "robots.txt$ favicon.ico$"

#

SkipFiles="robots.txt$ favicon.ico$ /xmlrpc.php REGEX[\/feed]"

Yup, that works, and it takes out exactly the sorta thing you don't care to see.

There's a lot more stuff in thereiv, including some remarkably quaint stack-state-machinesv harking back to what ~everything looked like in the late 90s. Altogether, there's worse ways to spend ten minutes, especially if you're running a web interface.

———Making summaries is an important activity at any court, and a key pillar in maintaining the coupling between a lord and the world. [↩]Linux, Apache, Mysqy, Php. Remember that ?

For the noobs : back when "free & open source" needed a killer app, to enact itself past the various "experts" and assorted morons, this was it [↩]Check them out, sometimes Republic-style communication happens for the heathens, too! By sheer accident, of course, but then what can you ask for. They are heathens for a reason after all. [↩]Take say

# Put here all other possible domain names, addresses or virtual host aliases

# someone can use to access your site.

Ever needed that ? [↩]People, by which we mean commoners, the sad sort who were never educated on the topic, tend to do ridiculous things such as implementing a complicated multi-step, unintentional "overwrite X" "oh wait, maybe you didn't want it over-written, save a copy here" sorta lulz. Like so :

# AWStats can purge log after processing it. By this way, the next time you

# launch AWStats, log file will be smaller and processing time will be better.

# IMPORTANT !!!

# AWStats is able to detect new lines in log file, to process only them, so

# you can launch AWStats as soon as you want, even with this parameter to 0.

# With 0, no purge is made, so you must use a scheduled task or a web server

# that make this purge frequently.

# With 1, the purge of the log file is made each time AWStats is ran.

# This parameter doesn't work with IIS (This web server doesn't let its log

# file to be purged).

# Possible values: 1 or 0

# Default: 0

#

PurgeLogFile=0

# When PurgeLogFile is setup to 1, AWStats will clean your log file after

# processing it. You can however keep an archive file (saved in "DirData") of

# all processed log records by setting this to 1 (For example if you want to

# use another log analyzer).

# This parameter is not used if PurgeLogFile=0

# Possible values: 1 or 0

# Default: 0

#

ArchiveLogRecords=0

# Each time you run the update process, AWStats overwrite the 'historic file'

# for the month (awstatsMMYYYY[.*].txt) with the updated one.

# When write errors occurs (IO, disk full,...), this historic file can be

# corrupted and must be deleted. Because this file contains information of all

# past processed log files, you will loose old stats if removed. So you can

# ask AWStats to save last non corrupted file in a .bak file. This file is

# stored in "DirData" directory with other 'historic files'.

# Possible values: 1 or 0

# Default: 1

#

KeepBackupOfHistoricFiles=1

Confucius sez : do not abuse the stack to implement CPU emulation in it! [↩]

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Thursday, 07 March, Year 11 d.Tr.