AWstats with Vlogger Rotation

Vlogger is a logging tool that you can pipe your Apache logs to. The logs will be broken down by virtual hosts and days. To do this, you need to put just one CustomLog directive into your global Apache configuration. I had two downsides to using Vlogger. One was that I could not use logrotate to trigger AWstats. The other is that old log files are not compressed.

Vlogger by default creates log files with names like these:

06202008-access.log
06192008-access.log
06182008-access.log

AWstats is flexible enough to allow for this naming convention (MM/DD/YYYY). In your site’s configuration file for AWstats you’ll need to set the LogFile value as such:

LogFile=”/var/log/apache2/your.domain.com/%MM-24%DD-24%YYYY-24-access.log”

This is simply the month minus 24 hours, the day minus 24 hours and the year minus 24 hours. Now that we have AWstats set to work with the log files generated by Vlogger we need to create a shell script that can manage the task for us via cron. Here is one I created that seems to be working quite nicely:

#!/bin/sh

logdir=/var/log/apache2
yesterdaysdate=`/bin/date -d "1 day ago" +%m%d%Y`
lastweeksdate=`/bin/date -d "7 days ago" +%m%d%Y`

cd ${logdir}

debug_out()
{
  if [ "$1" = '-debug' ] || [ "$1" = '-d' ];
  then
    echo "$2"
  fi
}

for directory in *
do
  # does the site (ServerName) directory exist and is there a matching awstats config file?
  awstatsconf="/etc/awstats/awstats.${directory}.conf"
  yesterdayslog="${logdir}/${directory}/${yesterdaysdate}-access.log"
  lastweekslog="${logdir}/${directory}/${lastweeksdate}-access.log"
  lastweekscompressedlog="${logdir}/${directory}/${lastweeksdate}-access.log.gz"
  if [ -d ${directory} ]
  then
    linebreak=0
    if [ -f ${awstatsconf} ]
    then
      # update statistics
      linebreak=1
      debug_message="executing:   /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=${directory} -update > /dev/null"
      debug_out "$1" "${debug_message}"
      /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=${directory} -update > /dev/null
    fi
    # is there a log for yesterday? If so then compress it.
    if [ -f ${yesterdayslog} ]
    then
      linebreak=1
      debug_message="executing:   gzip -q ${yesterdayslog}"
      debug_out "$1" "${debug_message}"
      gzip -q ${yesterdayslog}
    fi
    # is there a log for this day last week? If so remove it.
    if [ -f ${lastweekslog} ]
    then
      linebreak=1
      debug_message="executing:   rm -f ${lastweekslog}"
      debug_out "$1" "${debug_message}"
      rm -f ${lastweekslog}
    fi
    # is there a compressed log for this day last week? If so remove it.
    if [ -f ${lastweekscompressedlog} ]
    then
      linebreak=1
      debug_message="executing:   rm -f ${lastweekscompressedlog}"
      debug_out "$1" "${debug_message}"
      rm -f ${lastweekscompressedlog}
    fi
    if [ ${linebreak} = 1 ]
    then
      debug_out "$1" ""
    fi
  fi
done

exit 0

The above script can be called manually with -debug to see the steps being taken. The script will look for directories in Apache’s log directory and use their names when running AWstats. After AWstats has ran the file is then compressed. Files older than 7 days are removed but this can be adjusted as needed. Place this script in an area where it can be executed on your server such as /usr/local/sbin/awstats and make it executable (chmod 755). Then you’ll need a cron job to run this script daily like this:

0 4 * * * /usr/local/sbin/awstats &> /dev/null

And there you have it.