I have a host where Nginx listens on port 80 and dishes out requests to various apps depending on what their host name is. It also does appropriate load balancing. Primarily I use this for hosting various instances of Kete Ruby on Rails apps, but I also use it for supporting the subversion repository under Apache and a few other RoR apps, too. I wanted to setup up web log statistics for all of the above and I wanted to do it in such a way that it’s easy to add another web app to view statistics for.

Awstats is wicked easy to setup if you live in the LAMP world, but I could find a decent tutorial that covered my setup. So here goes…

Requirements

Besides the software listed in the title, this tutorial also assumes that you are running Debian Etch and have Apache2 setup (although not on port 80).

Install Awstats

On Debian Etch this is a one liner as root.

Set up Apache for Awstats

Configure A Domain

You’ll need to do this for every domain you want to get statistics for. This assumes you are still root and in the directory from the last section.

Now open /etc/awstats/awstats.your_domain.conf with your favorite text editor, as root. This is where we get into the Nginx specific stuff comes in. Change the LogFile parameter like so (based on using the default Nginx storage of log files):

there are few more that you need to change to match your domain:

and

and

You’ll need to do the following to make the matching directory that you specified in the DirData line:

In my case, I had to also chmod and chown the new directory, too.

Important Note: I have left the ability to update statistics off from the web, but allowed anyone to read statistics. This is fine for my clients, but may not be for yours. There are additional steps involved to lock it down, if needed

Again, note that you have to repeat the configuration for every domain.

Configure Nginx for the Awstats Web Server

Don’t forget to add DNS for whatever domain name you decide to go with.

In my case, I already had Nginx pointing at Apache running on port 8000 for HTTP access to my SVN repository. I simply tacked “stats.your_domain” onto my server_name line in /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf and restarted Nginx with /etc/init.d/nginx stop and start.

See this post for details.

Set up Logrotate for Nginx

Now edit /etc/logrotate.d/nginx. Change “/var/log/apache2/” to “/usr/local/nginx/logs/” and “/var/run/apache2.pid” to “/usr/local/nginx/logs/nginx.pid”. Also “/etc/init.d/apache2 restart” to “/etc/init.d/nginx restart” and “create 640 root adm” to “create 664 root staff”. Awstats user, www-data, needs permission to read the logs.

We also want to update our stats just before we run the weekly logrotate. Thus we add this before the postrotate line:

Your will need to add a awstats.pl update call for each domain here, between prerotate and endscript.

Run Awstats on Existing Log

If you haven’t already, you probably want to do this:

For each of your domains, do this:

Set up Cronjob of Domain

Edit /etc/cron.d/awstats. Replace what is in there with this:

This will update your stats every ten minutes.

Rails Production Log Rotation

Lastly, for the domains that are Ruby on Rails apps in production, we’ll want to rotate their Rails production log. http://nubyonrails.com/articles/2007/01/03/a-hodel-3000-compliant-logger-for-the-rest-of-us

Follow the instructions up to “Once More with Feeling” then add crob job –>

I’m running a small variant of what you can find here: rotate production logs

Ok, just repeat steps necessary to add domains.

Cheers,
Walter

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 11:21 am and is filed under kete development, open source, perl, random, ruby on rails, sysadmin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.