Webalizer quick setup guide

 Annual summary of TheRaphit.com
audience, produced by Webalizer.

[Graphique principal d'accès à www.theraphit.com]

[Click to view the full report]




Webalizer is a simple tool used to generate graphics figuring access statistics to a website, using several metrics. All the graphs are embedded in HTML pages - also generated by the program - which include hyperlinks to help navigate through the report easily.

Besides being quite outdated, it's still available as a package on many different UNIX flavors, and is still perfectly suited to use for a little website with mostly static content and not-so-much visits, such as mine. :-)

Should you need to set up an audience report for some larger website, I would recommand a more recently released software such as AWStats instead.

Webalizer in a nutshell



Webalizer is especially convenient to use : one single configuration file, one single command to generate the report, an update frequency at your discretion, all without having to intervene on your webserver logs.

Here is the requirements:
  • Your webserver is running on a UNIX machine of some kind - packages for Webalizer are available on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, ...
  • You have root access to the server
  • Your HTTP server software produces access log in the CLF format - all mainstream products (Apache, Lighttpd, Nginx, ...) do that
I'm using Webalizer version 2.23, that's the one available on all recent operating systems.



The configuration file



You'll find it under /etc/webalizer.conf or /usr/local/etc/webalizer.conf, knowing that you can specify any path to the configuration file when calling the program.

There's a sample configration file in the package, which is pretty good! It includes, as comments, all the needed information to understand the different options. Though, I'm going to focus here on what is the most important, and absolutely required.
  • LogFile : specifies where lies your HTTP server logfile. It has to be specified as an absolute UNIX path.
  • OutputDir : UNIX absolute path on your server where you want the generated HTML pages and graphs to be written. This has to match some place your HTTP daemon can access, so you'll be able to view the report directly in your browser.
  • ReportTitle & HostName : allows you to customize the title of the report's main page.
  • UseHTTPS : all HTML pages generated by the program will include hyperlinks to your website pages - you can choose here if you'd prefer to have URLs with http:// or https:// links.
  • DNSChildren : be sure to check that! If you leave the default configuration to 0, no reverse DNS lookup will be performed on the IP addresses that accessed your website in order to print the DNS names in the report. That might be your preference.
  • IndexAlias : if your website uses something else than index.html as a default page, you can tell the program here.
  • HideReferrer : you should at least specify here your own website's domain name, otherwise the 'referrers' data won't be really useful.
  • HideURL : allows you to exclude from the report all URLs that are irrelevant, such as the ones pointing to images or scripts. If you intent to make the report publicy available, you should also include here the URLs pointing to your private pages (if any) or they may be disclosed. All the paths are relative here, so the '/' is the root of your webserver - not the one of your UNIX filesystem.
  • IgnoreSite : allows you to totally ignore visites from selected IP addresses, DNS names or domains. Useful to hide your own visits to your site in the report.
When the configuration file is ready, all you need is to run the program by calling it with webalizer on the command line prompt, as root. You might add some extra parameters such as -c to switch to another configuration file, or -q (quiet) to suppress any output (useful with cron).

DNS lookups may last a bit long on the first run (several minutes). Don't worry this is intended, in order not to be too aggressive towards your DNS resolvers. The program uses a DNS cache file, which will help to speed up any subsequent calls.

The program has been written in the idea that your webserver logs are rotated at a time interval greater that one month. If you do rotate your logs at a higher frequency, you may have to dig deeper in the Webalizer configuration to enable its incremental features. By the way as I said in the intro, if you need to rotate your logs that often, Webalizer might not be the best tool for you.
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