Instant Web Stats with GoAccess

Productivity Sauce

A web log analyzer can come in rather useful when you run a web server on your own host. And if you need an uncomplicated and easy to deploy web log analyzer, GoAccess is what you need. This tool runs in the terminal and provides real-time web log analysis. GoAccess is available in the official software repositories of popular Linux distributions, so you can install it in a matter of minutes using the default package manager. On Debian and Ubuntu, you can deploy GoAccess by running the apt-get install goaccess command as root.

GoAccess requires no configuration, and it's dead-simple in use. On a machine running the Apache server, run the goaccess -f /var/log/apache2/access.log command to view a general summary. This summary packs an impressive amount of useful information. The General Statistics section, for example, shows the number of requests, uniques visitors, unique requested files, and bandwidth consumption. Other sections offer detailed information about operating systems, browsers, referrers, search key words, and much more. GoAccess also allows you to save the current data as an HTML file using the goaccess -f /var/log/apache2/access.log > report.html. And as any command-line tool, GoAccess supports a number of parameters. To list them and read their descriptions, use the man goaccess command.