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The Webalizer - A web server log file analysis tool Copyright 1997-1999 by Bradford L. Barrett (brad@mrunix.net) Distributed under the GNU GPL. See the files "COPYING" and "Copyright" supplied with the distribution for additional info. What is The Webalizer? ---------------------- The Webalizer is a web server log file analysis program which produces usage statistics in HTML format for viewing with a browser. The results are presented in both columnar and graphical format, which facilitates interpretation. Yearly, monthly, daily and hourly usage statistics are presented, along with the ability to display usage by site, URL, referrer, user agent (browser) and country (user agent and referrer are only available if your web server procduces Combined log format files). The Webalizer supports CLF (common log format) log files, as well as Combined log formats as defined by NCSA and others, and variations of these which it attempts to handle intelligently. This documentation applies to The Webalizer Version 1.22 Running the Webalizer --------------------- The Webalizer was designed to be run from a Unix command line prompt or as a cron job. There are several command line options which will modify the results it produces, and configuration files can be used as well. The format of the command line is: webalizer [options ...] [log-file] Where 'options' can be one or more of the supported command line switches described below. 'log-file' is the name of the log file to process (see below for more detailed information). Once executed, the general flow of the program follows: o A default configuration file is scanned for. A file named 'webalizer.conf' is searched for in the current directory, and if found, it's configuration data is parsed. If the file is not present in the current directory, the file '/etc/webalizer.conf' is searched for and, if found, is used instead. o Any command line arguments given to the program are parsed. This may include the specification of a configuration file, which is processed at the time it is encountered. o If a log file was specified, it is opened and made ready for processing. If no log file was given, STDIN is used for input. o If an output directory was specified, the program does a 'chdir' to that directory in prepration for generating output. If no output directory was given, the current directory is used. o If no hostname was given, the program attempts to get the hostname using a uname system call. If that fails, 'localhost' is used. o A history file is searched for. This file keeps previous month totals used on the main index.html page. The default file is named 'webalizer.hist', kept in the specified output directory, however may be changed using the "HistoryName" configuration file keyword. o If incremental processing was specified, a data file is searched for and loaded if found, containing the 'internal state' data of the program at the end of a previous run. The default file is named 'webalizer.current', kept in the specified output directory, however may be changed using the "IncrementalName" configuration file keyword. o Main processing begins on the log file. If the log spans multiple months, a seperate HTML document is created for each month. o After main processing, the main 'index.html' page is created, which has totals by month and links to each months HTML document. o A new history file is saved to disk, which includes totals generated by The Webalizer during the current run. o If incremental processing was specified, a data file is written that contains the 'internal state' data at the end of this run. Incremental Processing ---------------------- Version 1.2x of The Webalizer adds incremental run capability. Simply put, this allows processing large log files by breaking them up into smaller pieces, and processing these pieces instead. What this means in real terms is that you can now rotate your log files as often as you want, and still be able to produce monthly usage statistics without the loss of any detail. This is accomplished by saving and restoring all relevant internal data to a disk file between runs. Doing so allows the program to 'start where it left off' so to speak, and allows the preservation of detail from one run to the next. Some special precautions need to be taken when using the incremental run capability of The Webalizer. Configuration options should not be changed between runs, as that could cause corruption of the internal stored data. For example, changing the MangleAgents level will cause different representations of user agents to be stored, producing invalid results in the user agents section of the report. If you need to change configuration options, do it at the end of the month after normal processing of the previous month and before processing the current month. You may also want to delete the 'webalizer.current' file as well (or whatever name was specified using the "IncrementalName" configuration option). The Webalizer also attempts to prevent data duplication by keeping track of the timestamp of the last record processed. This timestamp is then compared to current records being processed, and any records that were logged previous to that timestamp are ignored. This, in theory, should allow you to re-process logs that have already been processed, or process logs that contain a mix of processed/not yet processed records, and not produce duplication of statistics. The only time this may break is if you have duplicate timestamps in two seperate log files... any records in the second log file that do have the same timestamp as the last record in the previous log file processed, will be discarded as if they had already been processed. There are lots of ways to prevent this however, for example, stopping the web server before rotating logs will prevent this situation. This setup also necessitates that you always process logs in chronological order, otherwise data loss will occur as a result of the timestamp compare. Command Line Options -------------------- The Webalizer supports many different configuration options that will alter the way the program behaves and generates output. Most of these can be specified on the command line, while some can only be specified in a configuration file. The command line options are listed below, with references to the corresponding configuration file keywords. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- General Options --------------- -h Display all available command line options and exit program. -v Display program version and exit program. -d Display additional 'debugging' information for errors and warnings produced during processing. This normally would not be used except to determine why you are getting all those errors and wanted to see the actual data. Normally The Webalizer will just tell you it found an error, not the actual data. This option will display the data as well. Config file keyword: Debug -g Use GMT (UTC) time instead of local timezone. Normally, The Webalizer will display the time generated in the timezone of the local machine, such as EDT or PST. This switch will cause the times to be displayed in GMT (UTC) time instead. Config file keyword: GMTTime -i Ignore history file. USE WITH CAUTION. This causes The Webalizer to ignore any existing history file produced from previous runs and generate it's output from scratch. The effect will be as if The Webalizer is being run for the first time and any previous statistics will be lost (although the HTML documents, if any, will not be deleted) on the main index.html (yearly) web page. Config file keyword: IgnoreHist -p Preserve state (incremental processing). This allows the processing of partial logs in increments. At the end of the program, all relevant internal data is saved, so that it may be restored the next time the program is run. This allows sites that must rotate their logs more than once a month to still be able to use The Webalizer, and not worry about having to gather and feed an entire months logs to the program at the end of the month. See the section on "Incremental Processing" below for additional information. The default is to not perform incremental processing. Use this command line option to enable the feature. Config file keyword: Incremental -q Quiet mode. Normally, The Webalizer will produce various messages while it runs letting you know what it's doing. This option will supress those messages. It should be noted that this WILL NOT supress errors and warnings, which are output to STDERR. Config file keyword: Quiet -Q ReallyQuiet mode. This allows supression of _all_ messages generated by The Webalizer, including warnings and errors. Useful when The Webalizer is run as a cron job. Config file keyword: ReallyQuiet -T Display timing information. The Webalizer keeps track of the time it begins and ends processing, and normally displays the total processing time at the end of each run. If quiet mode (-q or 'Quiet yes' in configuration file) is specified, this information is not displayed. This option forces the display of timing totals if quiet mode has been specified, otherwise it is redundant and will have no effect. Config file keyword: TimeMe -c file This option specifies a configuration file to use. Configuration files allow greater control over how The Webalizer behaves, and there are several ways to use them. As of version 0.98, The Webalizer searches for a default configuration file in the current directory named "webalizer.conf", and if not found, will search in the /etc/ directory for a file of the same name. In addition, you may specify a configuration file to use with this command line option. -n name This option specifies the hostname for the reports generated. The hostname is used in the title of all reports, and is also prepended to URL's in the reports. This allows The Webalizer to be run on log files for 'virtual' web servers or web servers that are different than the machine the reports are located on, and still allows clicking on the URL's to go to the proper location. If a hostname is not specified, either on the command line or in a configuration file, The Webalizer attempts to determine the hostname using a 'uname' system call. If this fails, "localhost" will be used as the hostname. Config file keyword: HostName -o dir This options specifies the output directory for the reports. If not specified here or in a configuration file, the current default directory will be used for output. Config file keyword: OutputDir -x name This option allows the generated pages to have an extension other than '.html', which is the default. Do not include the leading period ('.') when you specify the extension. Config file keyword: HTMLExtension -t name This option specifies the title string for all reports. This string is used, in conjunction with the hostname (if not blank) to produce the actual title. If not specified, the default of "Usage Statistics for" will be used. Config file keyword: ReportTitle -G Supress hourly graph. Normally, The Webalizer produces hourly statistics in both Graph and Columnar forms. This option will supress the Hourly Graph only from being generated. Config file keyword: HourlyGraph -H Supress Hourly statistics. Normally, The Webalizer produces hourly statistics in both Graph and Columnar forms. This option will supress the Hourly Statistics table only from being generated. Config file keyword: HourlyStats -M num Mangle user agent names. Normally, The Webalizer will keep track of the user agent field verbatim. Unfortunately, there are a ton of different names that user agents go by, and the field also reports other items such as machine type and OS used. For Example, Netscape 4.03 running on Windows 95 will report a different string than Netscape 4.03 running on Windows NT, so even though they are the same browser type, they will be considered as two totally different browsers by The Webalizer. For that matter, Netscape 4.0 running on Windows NT will report different names if one is run on an Alpha and the other on an Intel processor! Internet Exploder is even worse, as it reports itself as if it were Netscape and you have to search the given string a little deeper to discover that it is really MSIE! In order to consolidate generic browser types, this option will cause The Webalizer to 'mangle' the user agent field, attempting to consolidate generic browser types. There are 6 levels that can be specified, each producing different levels of detail. Level 5 displays only the browser name (MSIE or Mozilla) and the major version number. Level 4 will also display the minor version number (single decimal place). Level 3 will display the minor version number to two decimal places. Level 2 will add any sub-level designation (such as Mozilla/3.01Gold or MSIE 3.0b). Level 1 will also attempt to add the system type. The default Level 0 will disable name mangling and leave the user agent field unmodified, producing the greatest amount of detail. Configuration file keyword: MangleAgents Hide Options ------------ The following options take a string argument to use as a comparison for matching. Except for the IndexAlias option, the string argument can be plain text, or plain text that either starts or ends with the wildcard character '*'. For Example: Given the string "yourmama/was/here", the arguments "was", "*here" and "your*" will all produce a match. -a name This option allows hiding of user agents (browsers) from the "Top User Agents" table in the report. This option really isn't too useful as there are a zillion different names that current browsers go by, depending where they were obtained, however you might have some particular user agents that hit your site a lot that you would like to exclude from the list. You must have a web server that includes user agents in it's log files for this option to be of any use. In addition, it is also useless if you disable the user agent table in the report (see the -A command line option or "TopAgents" configuration file keyword). You can specify as many of these as you want on the command line. The wildcard character '*' can be used either in front of or at the end of the string. (ie: Mozilla/4.0* would match anything that starts with the string "Mozilla/4.0"). Config file keyword: HideAgent -r name This option allows hiding of referrers from the "Top Referrer" table in the report. Referrers are URL's, either on your own local site or a remote site, that refered the user to a URL on your web server. This option is normally used to hide your own server from the table, as your own pages are usually the top referrers to your own pages (well, you get the idea). You must have a web server that includes referrer information in the log files for this option to be of any use. In addition, it is also useless if you disable the referrers table in the report (see the -R command line option or "TopReferrers" configuration file keyword). You can specify as many of these as you like on the command line. Config file keyword: HideReferrer -s name This option allows hiding of sites from the "Top Sites" table in the report. Normally, you will only want to hide your own domain name from the report, as it usually is one of the top sites to visit your web server. This option is of no use if you disable the top sites table in the report (see the -S command line option or "TopSites" configuration file option). Config file keyword: HideSite -u name This option allows hiding of URL's from the "Top URL's" table in the report. Normally, this option is used to hide images, audio files and other objects your web server dishes out that would otherwise clutter up the table. This option is of no use if you diable the top URL's table in the report (see the -U command line option or "TopURLs" configuration file keyword). Config file keyword: HideURL -I name This option allows you to specify additional index.html aliases. The Webalizer usually strips the string 'index.' from URL's before processing, which has the effect of turning a URL such as /somedir/index.html into just /somedir/ which is really the same URL and should be treated as such. This option allows you to specify _additional_ strings that are to be treated the same way. Use with care, improper use could cause unexpected resluts. For example, if you specify the alias string of 'home', a URL such as /somedir/homepages/brad/home.html would be converted into just /somedir/ which probably isn't what was intended. This option is useful if your web server uses a different default index page other than the standard 'index.html' or 'index.htm', such as 'home.html' or 'homepage.html'. The string specified is searched for _anywhere_ in the URL, so "home.htm" would turn both "/somedir/home.htm" and "/somedir/home.html" into just "/somedir/". Go easy on this one, each string specified will be scanned for in EVERY log record, so if you specify a bunch of these, you will notice degraded performance. Wildcards are not allowed on this one. Config file keyword: IndexAlias Table Size Options ------------------ -A num This option specifies the number of entries to display in the "Top User Agents" table. To disable the table, use a value of zero (0). Config file keyword: TopAgents -C num This option specifies the number of entries to display in the "Top Countries" table. To disable the table, use a value of zero (0). Config file keyword: TopCountries -R num This option specifies the number of entries to display in the "Top Referrers" table. To disable the table, use a value of zero (0). Config file keyword: TopReferrers -S num This option specifies the number of entries to display in the "Top Sites" table. To disable the table, use a value of zero (0). Config file keyword: TopSites -U num This option specifies the number of entries to display in the "Top URL's" table. To disable the table, use a value of zero (0). Config file keyword: TopURLs -------------------------------------------------------------------------- CONFIGURATION FILES ------------------- The Webalizer allows configuration files to be used in order to simplify life for all. There are several ways that configuration files are accessed by the Webalizer. When The Webalizer first executes, it looks for a default configuration file named "webalizer.conf" in the current directory, and if not found there, will look for "/etc/webalizer.conf". In addition, configuration files may be specified on the command line with the '-c' option. There are lots of different ways you can combine the use of configuration files and command line options to produce various results. The Webalizer always looks for and reads configuration options from a default configuration file before doing anything else. Because of this, you can override options found in the default file by use of additional configuration files specified on the command line or command line options themselves. If you specify a configuration file on the command line, you can override options in it by additional command line options which follow. For example, most users will most likely want to create the default file /etc/webalizer.conf and place options in it to specify the hostname, log file, table options, etc... At the end of the month when a different log file is to be used (the end of month log), you can run TheWebalizer as usual, but put the different filename on the end of the command line, which will override the log file specified in the configuration file. It should be noted that you cannot override some configuration file options by the use of command line arguments. For example, if you specify "Quiet yes" in a configuration file, you cannot override this with a command line argument, as the command line option only _enables_ the feature (-q option). The configuration files are standard ASCII text files that may be created or edited using any standard editor. Blank lines and lines that begin with a pound sign ('#') are ignored. Any other lines are considered to be configurgation lines, and have the form "Keyword Value", where the 'Keyword' is one of the currently available configuration keywords defined below, and 'Value' is the value to assign to that particular option. Any text found after the keyword up to the end of the line is considered the keyword's value, so you should not include anything after the actual value on the line that is not actually part of the value being assigned. The file "sample.conf" provided with the distribution contains lots of useful documentation and examples as well. It should be noted that you do not have to use any configuration files at all, in which case, default values will be used (which should be sufficent for most sites). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- General Configuration Keywords ------------------------------ LogFile This defines the logfile to use. It should be a fully qualified name (ie: contain the path), but relative names will work as well. If not specified, the logfile defaults to STDIN. OutputDir This defines the output directory to use for the reports. If it is not specified, the current directory is used. Command line argument: -o HistoryName Allows specification of a history path/filename if desired. The default is to use the file named 'webalizer.hist', kept in the normal output directory (OutputDir above). Any name specified is relative to the normal output directory unless an absolute path name is given (ie: starts with a '/'). ReportTitle This specifies the title to use for the generated reports. It is used in conjunction with the hostname (unless blank) to produce the final report titles. If not defined, the default of "Usage Statistics for" is used. Command line argument: -t HostName This defines the hostname. The hostname is used in the report title as well as being prepended to URL's in the "Top URL's" table. This allows The Webalizer to be run on "virtual" web servers, or servers that do not reside on the local machine, and allows clicking on the URL to go to the right place. If not specified, The Webalizer attempts to get the hostname via a 'uname' system call, and if that fails, will default to "localhost". Command line argument: -n UseHTTPS Causes the links in the 'Top URL's' table to use 'https://' instead of the default 'http://' prefix. Not much use if you run a mix of secure/insecure servers on your machine. Only useful if you run the analysis on a secure servers logs, and want the links in the table to work properly. Quiet This allows you to enable or disable informational messages while it is running. The values for this keyword can be either 'yes' or 'no'. Using "Quiet yes" will supress these messages, while "Quiet no" will enable them. The default is 'no' if not specified, which will allow The Webalizer to display informational messages. It should be noted that this option has no effect on Warning or Error messages that may be generated, as they go to STDERR. Command line argument: -q TimeMe This allows you to display timing information regardless of any "quiet mode" specified. Useful only if you did in fact tell the webalizer to be quiet either by using the -q command line option or the "Quiet" keyword, otherwise timing stats are normally displayed anyway. Values may be either 'yes' or 'no', with the default being 'no'. Command line argument: -T GMTTime This keyword allows timestamps to be displayed in GMT (UTC) time instead of local time. Normally The Webalizer will display timestamps in the timezone of the local machine (ie: PST or EDT). This keyword allows you to specify the display of timestamps in GMT (UTC) time instead. Values may be either 'yes' or 'no'. Default is 'no'. Command line argument: -g Debug This tells The Webalizer to display additional information when it encounters Warnings or Errors. Normally, The Webalizer will just tell you it found a bad record or field. This option will enable the display of the actual data that produced the Warning or Error as well. Useful only if you start getting lots of Warnings or Errors and want to determine the cause. Values may be either 'yes' or 'no', with the default being 'no'. Command line argument: -d IgnoreHist This supresses the reading of a history file. USE WITH EXTREME CAUTION as the history file is how The Webalizer keeps track of previous months. The effect of this option is as if The Webalizer was being run for the very first time, and any previous data is discarded. Values may be either 'yes' or 'no', with the default being 'no'. Command line argument: -i HourlyGraph This keyword is used to either enable or disable the creation and display of the Hourly Usage graph. Values may be either 'yes' or 'no', with the default being 'yes'. Command line argument: -G HourlyStats This keyword is used to either enable or disable the creation and display of the Hourly Usage statistics table. Values may be either 'yes' or 'no', with the default being 'yes'. Command line argument: -H IndexAlias This allows additional 'index.html' aliases to be defined. Normally, The Webalizer scans for and strips the string "index." from URL's before processing them. This turns a URL such as /somedir/index.html into just /somedir/ which is really the same URL. This keyword allows _additional_ names to be treated in the same fashion for sites that use different default names, such as "home.html". The string is scanned for anywhere in the URL, so care should be used if and when you define additional aliases. For example, if you were to use an alias such as 'home', the URL /somedir/homepages/brad/home.html would be turned into just /somedir/ which probably isn't the intended result. Instead, you should have specified 'home.htm' which would correctly turn the URL into /somedir/homepages/brad/ like intended. It should also be noted that specified aliases are scanned for in EVERY log record... A bunch of aliases will noticably degrade performance as each record has to be scanned for every alias defined. You don't have to specify 'index.' as it is always the default. Command line argument: -I MangleAgents The MangleAgents keyword specifies the level of user agent name mangling, if any. There are 6 levels that may be specified, each producing a different level of detail displayed. Level 5 displays only the browser name (MSIE or Mozilla) and the major version number. Level 4 adds the minor version (single decimal place). Level 3 adds the minor version to two decimal places. Level 2 will also add any sub-level designation (such as Mozilla/3.01Gold or MSIE 3.0b). Level 1 will also attempt to add the system type. The default level 0 will leave the user agent field unmodified and produces the greatest amount of detail. Command line argument: -M Incremental This allows incremental processing to be enabled or disabled. Incremental processing allows processing partial logs without the loss of detail data from previous runs in the same month. This feature saves the 'internal state' of the program so that it may be restored in following runs. See the section above titled "Incremental Processing" for additional information. The value may be 'yes' or 'no', with the default being 'no'. Command line argument: -p IncrementalName Allows specification of the incremental data filename if desired. Normally, the file named "webalizer.current' is used, kept in the standard output directory. If specified, filenames are relative to the standard output directory, unless an absolute name is given (ie: starts with '/'). Top Table Keywords ------------------ TopAgents This allows you to specify how many "Top" user agents are displayed in the "Top User Agents" table. The default is 15. If you do not want to display user agent statistics, specify a value of zero (0). The display of user agents will only work if your web server includes this information in its log file (ie: a combined log format file). Command line argument: -A TopCountries This allows you to specify how many "Top" countries are displayed in the "Top Countries" table. The default is 50. If you want to disable the countries table, specify a value of zero (0). Command line argument: -C TopReferrers This allows you to specify how many "Top" referrers are displayed in the "Top Referrers" table. The default is 30. If you want to disable the referrers table, specify a value of zero (0). The display of referrer information will only work if your web server includes this information in its log file (ie: a combined log format file). Command line argument: -R TopSites This allows you to specify how many "Top" sites are displayed in the "Top Sites" table. The default is 30. If you want to disable the sites table, specify a value of zero (0). Command line argument: -S TopURLs This allows you to specify how many "Top" URL's are displayed in the "Top URL's" table. The default is 30. If you want to disable the URL's table, specify a value of zero (0). Command line argument: -U Hide Object Keywords -------------------- These keywords allow you to hide user agents, referrers, sites and URL's from the various "Top" tables. The value for these keywords are the same as those used in their command line counterparts. You can specify as many of these as you want without limit. Refer to the section above on "Command Line Options" for a description of the string formatting used as the value. Values cannot exceed 80 characters in length. HideAgent This allows specified user agents to be hidden from the "Top User Agents" table. Not very useful, since there a zillion different names by which browsers go by today, but could be useful if there is a particular user agent (ie: robots, spiders, realaudio, etc..) that hits your site frequently enough to make it into the top user agent listing. This keyword is useless if 1) your log file does not provide user agent information or 2) you disable the user agent table. Command line argument: -a HideReferrer This allows you to hide specfied referrers from the "Top Referrers" table. Normally, you would only specify your own web server to be hidden, as it is usually the top generator of references to your own pages. Of course, this keyword is useless if 1) your log file does not include referrer information or 2) you disable the top referrers table. Command line argument: -r HideSite This allows you to hide specified sites from the "Top Sites" table. Normally, you would only specify your own web server or other local machines to be hidden, as they are usually the highest hitters of your web site, especially if you have their browsers home page pointing to it. Command line argument: -s HideURL This allows you to hide URL's from the "Top URL's" table. Normally, this is used to hide items such as graphic files, audio files or other 'non-html' files that are transferred to the visiting user. Command line argument: -u Group Object Keywords --------------------- The Group* keywords allow object grouping based on Site, URL, Referrer and User Agent. Combined with the Hide* keywords, you can customize exactly what will be displayed in the 'Top' tables. For example, to only display totals for a particular directory, use a GroupURL and HideURL with the same value (ie: '/help/*'). Group processing is only done after the individual record has been fully processed, so name mangling and site total updates have already been peformed. Because of thie, groups are not counted in the main site total (as that would cause duplication). Groups can be displayed in bold and shaded as well. Grouped records are not, by default, hidden from the report. This allows you to display a grouped total, while still being able to see the individual records, even if they are part of the group. If you want to hide the detail records, follow the Group* directive with a Hide* one using the same value. There are no command line switches for these keywords. GroupReferrer Allows grouping Referrers. Can be handy for some of the major search engines that have multiple host names a referral could come from. GroupURL This keyword allows grouping URL's. Useful for grouping complete directory trees. GroupSite This keywords allows grouping Sites. Most used for grouping top level domains and unresolved IP address for local dial-ups, etc... GroupAgent Groups User Agents. A handy example of how you could use this one is to use "Mozilla" and "MSIE" as the values for GroupAgent and HideAgent keywords. Make sure you put the "MSIE" one first. GroupShading Allows shading of table rows for groups. Value can be 'yes' or 'no', with the default being 'yes'. GroupHighlight Allows bolding of table rows for groups. Value can be 'yes' or 'no', with the default being 'yes'. Ignore/Include Object Keywords ---------------------- These keywords allow you to completely ignore log records when generating statistics, or to force their inclusion regardless of ignore criteria. Records can be ignored or included based on site, URL, user agent and referrer. Be aware that by choosing to ignore records, the accuracy of the generated statistics become skewed, making it impossible to produce an accurate representation of load on the web server. These keywords behave identical to the Hide* keywords above, where the value can have a leading or trailing wildcard '*'. These keywords, like the Hide* ones, have an absolute limit of 80 characters for their values. These keywords do not have any command line switch counterparts, so they may only be specified in a configuration file. It should also be pointed out that using the Ignore/Include combination to selectivly exclude an entire site while including a particular 'chunk' is _extremely_ inefficent, and should be avoided. Try grep'ing the records into a seperate file and process it instead. IgnoreSite This allows specified sites to be completely ignored from the generated statistics. IgnoreURL This allows specified URL's to be completely ignored from the generated statistics. One use for this keyword would be to ignore all hits to a 'temporary' directory where development work is being done, but is not accessable to the outside world. IgnoreReferrer This allows records to be ignored based on the referrer field. IgnoreAgent This allows specified User Agent records to be completely ignored from the statistics. Maybe useful if you really don't want to see all those hits from MSIE :) IncludeSite Force the record to be processed based on hostname. This takes precedence over the Ignore* keywords. IncludeURL Force the record to be processed based on URL. This takes precedence over the Ignore* keywords. IncludeReferrer Force the record to be processed based on referrer. This takes precedence over the Ignore* keywords. IncludeAgent Force the record to be processed based on user agent. This takes precedence over the Ignore* keywords. HTML Generation Keywords ------------------------ These keywords allow you to customize the HTML code that The Webalizer produces, such as adding a corporate logo or links to other web pages. You can specify as many of these keywords as you like, and they will be used in the order that they are found in the file. Values cannot exceed 80 characters in length, so you may have to break long lines up into two or more lines. There are no command line counterparts to these keywords. HTMLExtension Allows generated pages to use something other than the default 'html' extension for the filenames. Do not include the leading period ('.') when you specify the extension. Command line argument: -x HTMLPre Allows code to be inserted at the very beginning of the HTML files. Defaults to the standard HTML 3.2 DOCTYPE record. Be careful not to include any HTML here, as it is inserted _before_ the <HTML> tag in the file. Use it for server-side scripting capabilities, such as php3, to insert scripting files and other directives. HTMLHead Allows you to insert HTML code between the <HEAD></HEAD> block. There is no default. Useful for adding scripts to the HTML page, such as Javascript or php3, or even just for adding a few META tags to the document. HTMLBody This keyword defines HTML code to be placed immediately after the <HEAD> section of the report, just before the title and "summary period/generated on" lines. If used, the first HTMLHead line MUST include a <BODY> tag. Put whatever else you want in subsequent lines, but keep in mind the placement of this code in relation to the title and other aspcects of the web page. Some typical uses are to change the page colors and posibly add a corporate logo (graphic) in the top right. If not specified, a default <BODY> tag is used that defines page color, text color and link colors (see "sample.conf" file for example). HTMLPost This keyword defines HTML code that is placed after the title and "summary period/generated on" lines, just before the initial horizontal rule <HR> tag. Normally this keyword isn't needed, but is provided in case you included a large graphic or some other weird formatting tag in the HTMLHead section that needs to be cleaned up or terminated before the main report section. HTMLTail This keyword defines HTML code that is placed at the bottom right side of the report. It is inserted in a <TABLE> section between table data <TD>..</TD> tags, and is top and right aligned within the table. Normally this keyword is used to provide a link back to your home page or insert a small graphic at the bottom right of the page. HTMLEnd This allows insertion of closing code, at the very end of the page. The default is to put the closing </BODY> and </HTML> tags. If specified, you _must_ specify these tags yourself. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes on Log Files ------------------ The Webalizer supports CLF log formats, which should work for just about everyone. If you want User Agent or Referrer information, you need to make sure your web server supplies this information in it's log file, and in a format that the Webalizer can understand. While The Webalizer will try to handle many of the subtle variations in log formats, some will not work at all. Most web servers output CLF format logs by default. For Apache, in order to produce the proper log format, add the following to the httpd.conf file: LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\"" This instructs the Apache web server to produce a 'combined' log that includes the referrer and user agent information on the end of each record, enclosed in quotes (This is the standard recommended by both Apache and NCSA). Netscape and other web servers have similar capabilities to alter their log formats. (note: the above works for apache servers up to V1.2. V1.3 and higher now have additonal ways to spcify log formats... refer to included documentation). Notes on Referrers ------------------ Referrers are weird critters... They take many shapes and forms, which makes it much harder to analyze than a typical URL, which at least has some standardization. What is contained in the referrer field of your log files varies depending on many factors, such as what site did the referral, what type of system it comes from and how the actual referal was generated. Why is this? Well, because a user can get to your site in many ways... They may have your site bookmarked in their browser, they may simply type your sites URL field in their browser, they could have clicked on a link on some remote web page or they may have found your site from one of the many search engines and site indexes found on the web. The Webalizer attempts to deal with all this variation in an intelligent way by doing certain things to the referrer string which makes it easier to analyze. Of course, if your web server doesn't provide referrer information, you probably don't really care and are asking yourself why you are reading this section... Most referrer's will take the form of "http://somesite.com/somepage.html", which is what you will get if the user clicks on a link somewhere on the web in order to get to your site. Some will be a variation of this, and look something like "file:/some/such/sillyname", which is a reference from a HTML document on the users local machine. Several variations of this can be used, depending on what type of system the user has, if he/she is on a local network, the type of network, etc... To complicate things even more, dynamic HTML documents and HTML documents that are generated by cgi scripts or external programs produce lots of extra information which is tacked on to the end of the referrer string in an almost infinate number of ways. If the user just typed your URL into their browser or clicked on a bookmark, there won't be any information in the referrer field and will take the form "-". In order to handle all these variations, The Webalizer parses the referrer field in a certain way. First, if the referrer string begins with "http", it assumes it is a normal referral and converts the "http://" and following hostname to lowercase in order to simplify hiding if desired. For example, the referrer "HTTP://WWW.MyHost.Com/This/Is/A/HTML/Document.html" will become "http://www.myhost.com/This/Is/A/HTML/Document.html". Notice that only the "http://" and hostname are converted to lower case... The rest of the referrer field is left alone. This follows standard convention, as the actuall method (HTTP) and hostname are always case insensitive, while the document name portion is case sensitive. Referrers that came from search engines, dynamic HTML documents, cgi scripts and other external programs usually tack on additional information that it used to create the page. A common example of this can be found in referrals that come from search engines and site indexes common on the web. Sometimes, these referrers URL's can be several hundred characters long and include all the information that the user typed in to search for your site. The Webalizer deals with this type of referrer by stripping off all the query information, which starts with a question mark '?'. The Referrer "http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=usa%26global%26link" will be converted to just "http://search.yahoo.com/search". When a user comes to your site by using one of their bookmarks or by typing in your URL directly into their browser, the referrer field is blank, and looks like "-". Most sites will get more of these referrals than any other type. The Webalizer converts this type of referral into the string "- (Direct Request)". This is done in order to make it easier to hide via a command line option or configuration file option. This is because the character "-" is a valid character elsewhere in a referrer field, and if not turned into something unique, could not be hidden without possibly hiding other referrers that shouldn't be. Notes on Character Escaping --------------------------- The HTTP protocol defines certain ways that URL's can look and behave. To some extent, referrer fields follow most of the same conventions. Character escaping is a technique by which non-printable or other non-ASCII (and even some ASCII) characters can be used in a URL. This is done by placing the Hexdecimal value of the character in the URL, preceed by a percent sign '%'. Since Hex values are made up of ASCII characters, any character can be escaped to ensure only printable ASCII characters are present in the URL. Some systems take this concept to the extreme and escape all sorts of stuff, even characters that don't need to be escaped. To deal with this, The Webalizer will un-escape URL's and referrers before being processed. For Example, the URL "/www.mrunix.net/%7Ebrad/resume.html" is the same URL as "/www.mrunix.net/~brad/resume.html", a very common form of a URL to access users web pages. If the URL's were not un-escaped, they would be treated as two seperate documents, even though they are really one and the same. Random thoughts on DNS lookups ------------------------------ A lot of people have asked for the ability to do DNS lookups within The Webalizer, as their servers don't do the reverse mapping. My usual response is that there are far too many such programs and scripts that will process a log file doing just that. One such program is 'logresolve' that comes with the Apache distribution (in the /support directory of the source distribution). On my machines, there are several programs that process log files at the end of each month, and it is much easier to do the reverse DNS lookups one time only, instead of multiple times in seperate places. Reverse DNS lookups may be included in a future release, but I don't guarantee it. Log files and The Webalizer --------------------------- Most sites will choose to have The Webalizer run from cron at specified intervals. Care should be taken to ensure that data is not lost as a result of log file rotations. A suggested practice is to rotate your web server logs at the end of each month as close to midnight as possible, then have The Webalizer process the 'end of month' log file before running statistics on the new, current log. On our systems, a shell script called 'rotate_logs' is run at midnight, the end of each month. This script file looks like: ------------------------- file: rotate_logs ------------------------------ #!/bin/sh # halt the server kill `cat /var/lib/httpd/logs/httpd.pid` # define backup names OLD_ACCESS_LOG=/var/lib/httpd/logs/old/access_log.`date +%y%m%d-%H%M%S` OLD_ERROR_LOG=/var/lib/httpd/logs/old/error_log.`date +%y%m%d-%H%M%S` # make end of month copy for analyzer cp /var/lib/httpd/logs/access_log /var/lib/httpd/logs/access_log.backup # move files to archive directory mv /var/lib/httpd/logs/access_log `echo $OLD_ACCESS_LOG` mv /var/lib/httpd/logs/error_log `echo $OLD_ERROR_LOG` # restart web server /usr/sbin/httpd # compress the archived files /bin/gzip $OLD_ACCESS_LOG /bin/gzip $OLD_ERROR_LOG ------------------------- end of file ------------------------------------ This script first stops the web server using a 'kill' command. Apache keeps the PID of the server in the file httpd.pid, so we use it as the argument for the kill. Next, it defines some names for the backup files, which are basically the name of the files with the date and time appended to the end of them. It then makes a copy of the log file, appended with '.backup' in the log directory, moves the current log files to an archive directory (/var/lib/httpd/logs/old) and restarts the server. This setup allows the web server to be down for the minimum amount of time needed, which is important for busy sites. If you don't want to stop the server, you can remove the inital 'kill' command, and replace the '/usr/sbin/httpd' line with "kill -1 `cat /var/lib/httpd/logs/httpd.pid`" command instead, On most web servers, this will cause a restart of the server and create the new log files in the process... At this point, we have made copies of the previous months logs, the web server is going about it's business as usual, and we have all the time in the world to do any other additional processing we want. The last two lines of the script compress the archived logs using the GNU zip program (gzip). Remember, we still have a copy of the log which we can now run The Webalizer on without having to do any further processing. Next, we define two crontab entries. The first runs the above 'rotate_logs' script at midnight at the end of the month. The second runs The Webalizer on the '.backup' log file created above at 5 minutes after midnight. This gives other end of month processing jobs a chance to run so we don't bog the system down too much. If you have lots of end of month stuff going on, you can change the timing to suit your needs. The crontab entries look something like: ------------------------- crontab entries -------------------------------- # Rotate web server logs and run monthly analysis 0 0 1 * * /usr/local/adm/rotate_logs 5 0 1 * * /usr/bin/webalizer -Q /var/lib/httpd/logs/access_log.backup ------------------------- end of crontab --------------------------------- As you can see, the log rotations occur at midnight, and the analysis is done at 5 minutes after. Once you verify that The Webalizer ran successfully, the access_log.backup file can be deleted as it isn't needed any more. If you need to re-run the analysis, you still have the compressed archive copy that the shell script created. In order for the above analysis to work properly, you should have already created an /etc/webalizer.conf configuration file sutable for your site, or otherwise specify configuration options or a configuration file on the crontab command line above. If you want The Webalizer to be run more often than once a month, you can specify additional crontab entries to do this as well. Care should be taken however to ensure that The Webalizer is not running when the end of month processing above occurs, or unpredictable results may happen (such as an inability to rotate the logs due to a file lock). The easiest way is to run it on the half hour with a crontab entry like: 30 * * * * /usr/bin/webalizer Language Support ---------------- Version 1.0x of The Webalizer added language support. This support is only provided at compile time in the form of an include file containing all the strings used by The Webalizer. The source distribution contains all language files that were available at the time, with English being the default as that is the only human language I speek fluently, and me Espanol es muy malo. Several people have already indicated the desire to do translations into various languages, and as I receive the language files, will make them available via ftp at ftp://ftp.mrunix.net/pub/webalizer/lang. Unless there happens to be a binary distribution in the language you need, you will need to grab the source distribution and compile the program yourself. See the file INSTALL that comes in the source distribution for information on how to use a language other than English. It should also be noted that the GD graphics library, used to produce the inline graphics in the output HTML, doesn't support extended character sets, so if you are translating the language file, you will no doubt encounter this problem. Known Issues ------------ o Memory Usage. The Webalizer makes liberal use of memory for internal data structures during analysis. Lack of real physical memory will noticably degrade performance by doing lots of swapping between memory and disk. One user who had a rather large log file noticed that The Webalizer took over 7 hours to run with only 16 Meg of memory. Once memory was increased, the time was reduced to a few minutes. o Proxy servers. The Webalizer does not know how to deal with proxy records, which can cause some rather unexpected results. If you do run the stats on a proxy servers log file, you get to see where your users have been visiting, as well as who has visited your server. If someone knows of a reliable way to differentiate between normal log records and proxy ones, please let me know. o Performance. The Hide*, Group*, Ignore* and IndexAlias configuration options can cause a performance decrease if lots of them are used. The reason for this is that every log record must be scanned for each item in each list. For example, if you are Hiding 20 objects, Grouping 20 more, and Ignoring 5, each record is scanned 46 times (20+20+5 + an IndexAlias scan). On really large log files, this can have a profound impact. Final Notes ----------- A lot of time and effort went into making The Webalizer, and to ensure that the results are as accurate as possible. If you find any abnormalities or inconsistant results, bugs, errors, ommisions or anything else that doesn't look right, please let me know so I can investigate the problem or correct the error. This goes for the minimal documentation as well. Suggestions for future versions are also welcome and apperciated.