GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal on *nix systems or through your browser. It provides fast and valuable HTTP statistics for system administrators that require a visual server report on the fly. More info at: https://goaccess.io.
GoAccess parses the specified web log file and outputs the data to the X terminal. Features include:
-
Completely Real Time
All panels and metrics are timed to be updated every 200 ms on the terminal output and every second on the HTML output. -
Minimal Configuration needed
You can just run it against your access log file, pick the log format and let GoAccess parse the access log and show you the stats. -
Track Application Response Time
Track the time taken to serve the request. Extremely useful if you want to track pages that are slowing down your site. -
Nearly All Web Log Formats
GoAccess allows any custom log format string. Predefined options include, Apache, Nginx, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, etc. -
Incremental Log Processing
Need data persistence? GoAccess has the ability to process logs incrementally through the on-disk B+Tree database. -
Only one dependency
GoAccess is written in C. To run it, you only need ncurses as a dependency. That's it. It even features its own Web Socket server — http://gwsocket.io/. -
Visitors
Determine the amount of hits, visitors, bandwidth, and metrics for slowest running requests by the hour, or date. -
Metrics per Virtual Host
Have multiple Virtual Hosts (Server Blocks)? It features a panel that displays which virtual host is consuming most of the web server resources. -
Color Scheme Customizable
Tailor GoAccess to suit your own color taste/schemes. Either through the terminal, or by simply applying the stylesheet on the HTML output. -
Support for Large Datasets
GoAccess features an on-disk B+Tree storage for large datasets where it is not possible to fit everything in memory. -
Docker Support
Ability to build GoAccess' Docker image from upstream. You can still fully configure it, by using Volume mapping and editinggoaccess.conf. See Docker section below.
GoAccess allows any custom log format string. Predefined options include, but not limited to:
- Amazon CloudFront (Download Distribution).
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
- AWS Elastic Load Balancing
- Combined Log Format (XLF/ELF) Apache | Nginx
- Common Log Format (CLF) Apache
- Google Cloud Storage.
- Apache virtual hosts
- Squid Native Format.
- W3C format (IIS).
GoAccess was designed to be a fast, terminal-based log analyzer. Its core idea is to quickly analyze and view web server statistics in real time without needing to use your browser (great if you want to do a quick analysis of your access log via SSH, or if you simply love working in the terminal).
While the terminal output is the default output, it has the capability to
generate a complete, self-contained, real-time HTML
report, as well as a JSON, and
CSV report.
You can see it more of a monitor command tool than anything else.
GoAccess can be compiled and used on *nix systems.
Download, extract and compile GoAccess with:
$ wget https://tar.goaccess.io/goaccess-1.3.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf goaccess-1.3.tar.gz
$ cd goaccess-1.3/
$ ./configure --enable-utf8 --enable-geoip=legacy
$ make
# make install
$ git clone https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess.git
$ cd goaccess
$ autoreconf -fiv
$ ./configure --enable-utf8 --enable-geoip=legacy
$ make
# make install
It is easiest to install GoAccess on Linux using the preferred package manager of your Linux distribution. Please note that not all distributions will have the lastest version of GoAccess available.
# apt-get install goaccess
Note: It is likely this will install an outdated version of GoAccess. To make sure that you're running the latest stable version of GoAccess see alternative option below.
$ echo "deb https://deb.goaccess.io/ $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/goaccess.list
$ wget -O - https://deb.goaccess.io/gnugpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install goaccess
Note:
- For on-disk support (Trusty+ or Wheezy+), run:
sudo apt-get install goaccess-tcb .debpackages in the official repo are available through HTTPS as well. You may need to installapt-transport-https.
# yum install goaccess
# pacman -S goaccess
# emerge net-analyzer/goaccess
# brew install goaccess
# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/goaccess/ && make install clean
# pkg install sysutils/goaccess
# cd /usr/ports/www/goaccess && make install clean
# pkg_add goaccess
# zypper ar -f obs://server:http
# zypper ref && zypper in goaccess
# pkg install goaccess
# pkgin install goaccess
GoAccess can be used in Windows through Cygwin. See Cygwin's packages. Or through the Linux Subsystem on Windows 10.
GoAccess has minimal requirements, it's written in C and requires only ncurses. However, below is a table of some optional dependencies in some distros to build GoAccess from source.
| Distro | NCurses | GeoIP (opt) | Tokyo Cabinet (opt) | OpenSSL (opt) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu/Debian | libncursesw5-dev | libgeoip-dev | libtokyocabinet-dev | libssl-dev |
| Fedora/RHEL/CentOS | ncurses-devel | geoip-devel | tokyocabinet-devel | openssl-devel |
| Arch Linux | ncurses | geoip | compile from source | openssl |
| Gentoo | sys-libs/ncurses | dev-libs/geoip | dev-db/tokyocabinet | dev-libs/openssl |
| Slackware | ncurses | GeoIP | tokyocabinet | openssl |
Note: The following example assumes you will store your GoAccess data below
/srv/goaccess, but you can use a different prefix if you like or if you run
as non-root user.
mkdir -p /srv/goaccess/{data,html}
Before running your own GoAccess Docker container, first create a config file
in /srv/goaccess/data. You can start one from scratch or use the one from
config/goaccess.conf
as a starting point and change it as needed.
A minimal config file for a real-time HTML report requires at least the
following options: log-format, log-file, output and real-time-html. For
example, for Apache's combined log format:
log-format COMBINED
log-file /srv/logs/access.log
output /srv/report/index.html
real-time-html true
If you want to expose goaccess on a different port on the host machine, you
have to set the ws-url option in the config file, e.g.:
ws-url ws://example.com:8080
or for secured connections (TLS/SSL), please ensure your configuration file contains the following lines:
ssl-cert /srv/data/domain.crt
ssl-key /srv/data/domain.key
ws-url wss://example.com:8080
Once you have your configuration file all set, clone the repo:
$ git clone https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess.git goaccess && cd $_
and then build and run the image as follows:
docker build . -t allinurl/goaccess
docker run --restart=always -d -p 7890:7890 \
-v "/srv/goaccess/data:/srv/data" \
-v "/srv/goaccess/html:/srv/report" \
-v "/var/log/apache2:/srv/logs" \
--name=goaccess allinurl/goaccess
If you you made changes to the config file after building the image, you don't have to rebuild from scratch. Simply restart the container:
docker restart goaccess
And restart the container as follows:
docker run --restart=always -d -p 8080:7890 \
-v "/srv/goaccess/data:/srv/data" \
-v "/srv/goaccess/html:/srv/report" \
-v "/var/log/apache:/srv/logs" \
--name=goaccess allinurl/goaccess
If you had already run the container, you may have to stop and remove it first:
docker stop goaccess
docker rm goaccess
Note, it is possible to specify a different command and command line options to run in the container directly on the docker command line, e.g.:
docker run --restart=always -d -p 8080:7890 \
-v "/srv/goaccess/data:/srv/data" \
-v "/srv/goaccess/html:/srv/report" \
-v "/var/log/apache:/srv/logs" \
--name=goaccess allinurl/goaccess \
goaccess --no-global-config --config-file=/srv/data/goaccess.conf \
--ws-url=example.org:8080 --output=/srv/report/index.html \
--log-file=/srv/logs/access.log
The container and image can be completely removed as follows:
docker stop goaccess
docker rm goaccess
docker rmi allinurl/goaccess
There is also a prebuilt docker image that can be run without cloning the git repository:
docker run --restart=always -d -p 8080:7890 \
-v "/srv/goaccess/data:/srv/data" \
-v "/srv/goaccess/logs:/srv/logs" \
-v "/srv/goaccess/html:/srv/report" \
--name=goaccess allinurl/goaccess
There are three storage options that can be used with GoAccess. Choosing one will depend on your environment and needs.
In-memory storage provides better performance at the cost of limiting the dataset size to the amount of available physical memory. By default GoAccess uses in-memory hash tables. If your dataset can fit in memory, then this will perform fine. It has very good memory usage and pretty good performance.
Use this storage method for large datasets where it is not possible to fit everything in memory. The B+ tree database is slower than any of the hash databases since data has to be committed to disk. However, using an SSD greatly increases the performance. You may also use this storage method if you need data persistence to quickly load statistics at a later date.
An alternative to the default hash tables. It uses generic typing and thus it's performance in terms of memory and speed is average.
See options that can be supplied to the command or
specified in the configuration file. If specified in the configuration file, long
options need to be used without prepending --.
Note: Piping data into GoAccess won't prompt a log/date/time configuration dialog, you will need to previously define it in your configuration file or in the command line.
To output to a terminal and generate an interactive report:
# goaccess access.log
To generate an HTML report:
# goaccess access.log -a > report.html
To generate a JSON report:
# goaccess access.log -a -d -o json > report.json
To generate a CSV file:
# goaccess access.log --no-csv-summary -o csv > report.csv
GoAccess also allows great flexibility for real-time filtering and parsing. For instance, to quickly diagnose issues by monitoring logs since goaccess was started:
# tail -f access.log | goaccess -
And even better, to filter while maintaining opened a pipe to preserve
real-time analysis, we can make use of tail -f and a matching pattern tool
such as grep, awk, sed, etc:
# tail -f access.log | grep -i --line-buffered 'firefox' | goaccess --log-format=COMBINED -
or to parse from the beginning of the file while maintaining the pipe opened and applying a filter
# tail -f -n +0 access.log | grep -i --line-buffered 'firefox' | goaccess -o report.html --real-time-html -
There are several ways to parse multiple logs with GoAccess. The simplest is to pass multiple log files to the command line:
# goaccess access.log access.log.1
It's even possible to parse files from a pipe while reading regular files:
# cat access.log.2 | goaccess access.log access.log.1 -
Note: the single dash is appended to the command line to let GoAccess know that it should read from the pipe.
Now if we want to add more flexibility to GoAccess, we can do a series of pipes. For instance, if we would like to process all compressed log files access.log.*.gz in addition to the current log file, we can do:
# zcat access.log.*.gz | goaccess access.log -
Note: On Mac OS X, use gunzip -c instead of zcat.
GoAccess has the ability the output real-time data in the HTML report. You can even email the HTML file since it is composed of a single file with no external file dependencies, how neat is that!
The process of generating a real-time HTML report is very similar to the
process of creating a static report. Only --real-time-html is needed to make
it real-time.
# goaccess access.log -o /usr/share/nginx/html/your_site/report.html --real-time-html
To view the report you can navigate to http://your_site/report.html.
By default, GoAccess will use the host name of the generated report. Optionally, you can specify the URL to which the client's browser will connect to. See FAQ for a more detailed example.
# goaccess access.log -o report.html --real-time-html --ws-url=goaccess.io
By default, GoAccess listens on port 7890, to use a different port other than 7890, you can specify it as (make sure the port is opened):
# goaccess access.log -o report.html --real-time-html --port=9870
And to bind the WebSocket server to a different address other than 0.0.0.0, you can specify it as:
# goaccess access.log -o report.html --real-time-html --addr=127.0.0.1
Note: To output real time data over a TLS/SSL connection, you need to use
--ssl-cert=<cert.crt> and --ssl-key=<priv.key>.
Another useful pipe would be filtering dates out of the web log
The following will get all HTTP requests starting on 05/Dec/2010 until the
end of the file.
# sed -n '/05\/Dec\/2010/,$ p' access.log | goaccess -a -
or using relative dates such as yesterdays or tomorrows day:
# sed -n '/'$(date '+%d\/%b\/%Y' -d '1 week ago')'/,$ p' access.log | goaccess -a -
If we want to parse only a certain time-frame from DATE a to DATE b, we can do:
# sed -n '/5\/Nov\/2010/,/5\/Dec\/2010/ p' access.log | goaccess -a -
Assuming your log contains the virtual host field. For instance:
vhost.io:80 8.8.4.4 - - [02/Mar/2016:08:14:04 -0600] "GET /shop HTTP/1.1" 200 615 "-" "Googlebot-Image/1.0"
And you would like to append the virtual host to the request in order to see which virtual host the top urls belong to:
awk '$8=$1$8' access.log | goaccess -a -
To do the same, but also use real-time filtering and parsing:
tail -f access.log | unbuffer -p awk '$8=$1$8' | goaccess -a -
To exclude a list of virtual hosts you can do the following:
# grep -v "`cat exclude_vhost_list_file`" vhost_access.log | goaccess -
To parse specific pages, e.g., page views, html, htm, php, etc. within a
request:
# awk '$7~/\.html|\.htm|\.php/' access.log | goaccess -
Note, $7 is the request field for the common and combined log format,
(without Virtual Host), if your log includes Virtual Host, then you probably
want to use $8 instead. It's best to check which field you are shooting for,
e.g.:
# tail -10 access.log | awk '{print $8}'
Or to parse a specific status code, e.g., 500 (Internal Server Error):
# awk '$9~/500/' access.log | goaccess -
Or multiple status codes, e.g., all 3xx and 5xx:
# tail -f -n +0 access.log | awk '$9~/3[0-9]{2}|5[0-9]{2}/' | goaccess -o out.html -
And to get an estimated overview of how many bots (crawlers) are hitting your server:
# tail -F -n +0 access.log | grep -i --line-buffered 'bot' | goaccess -
Also, it is worth pointing out that if we want to run GoAccess at lower priority, we can run it as:
# nice -n 19 goaccess -f access.log -a
and if you don't want to install it on your server, you can still run it from your local machine!
# ssh root@server 'cat /var/log/apache2/access.log' | goaccess -a -
GoAccess has the ability to process logs incrementally through the on-disk B+Tree database. It works in the following way:
- A data set must be persisted first with
--keep-db-files, then the same data set can be loaded with--load-from-disk. - If new data is passed (piped or through a log file), it will append it to the original data set.
- To preserve the data at all times,
--keep-db-filesmust be used. - If
--load-from-diskis used without--keep-db-files, database files will be deleted upon closing the program.
// last month access log
# goaccess access.log.1 --keep-db-files
then, load it with
// append this month access log, and preserve new data
# goaccess access.log --load-from-disk --keep-db-files
To read persisted data only (without parsing new data)
# goaccess --load-from-disk --keep-db-files
Any help on GoAccess is welcome. The most helpful way is to try it out and give feedback. Feel free to use the Github issue tracker and pull requests to discuss and submit code changes.
Enjoy!