A blog about Ruby, Rails and other Tech. Mostly.

22nd Jun 2004, 1:05pm

AWStats

I have started to use AWStats to monitor the usage for my website.

It's pretty simple to set up. Just unpack it, make some small changes in your httpd.conf, then edit an awstats conf file for your site and off you go.

It's written in Perl. It simply collects information from the apache logfile and records the information in its own files, and then places information and graphics into a static page for you to view. The update process can be run from the command line, can be run regularly from cron, or you can set things so that you can update from your browser.

It's not super fast on large log files, but this isn't a problem for me. I get Apache to write a seperate log file for my own virtual host, so the log file size is quite small.

It provides all the stats I would need, and is easily configurable - for instance I was able easily to exclude accesses from my own machine from the results. This is a nice product.