Peter's Blog

I never did get around to trying to install awstats. I've been using Statcounter but I fancied trying awstats with reverse DNS turned on. I can't do this on my Site5 host as they don't like reverse DNS. I didn't install it on Gentoo as that looked like big time hastle.

I realised today that installing awstats under Ubuntu should be as simple as installing the awstats package and it almost is. I can install it on my home server, download my Site5 access logs there and let awstats format them up.

Here are the steps I had to take to install it:

• Install awstats package
• Edit a file called /etc/awstats/awstats.hostname.conf where hostname is the hostname. Put something like this in it:

  LogFile="/var/log/apache/access.log"
  LogFormat=1
  DNSLookup=1
  DirData="/var/cache/awstats/"
  DirCgi="/cgi-bin"
  DirIcons="/icon"
  SiteDomain="hostname"
  AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=1
  AllowFullYearView=3
  

• Make a directory called /var/cache and chmod it 777 so it can be used from the web server
• Copy icons to web directory:

  cp -r /usr/share/awstats/icon /var/www/icon
  

• Run this to update databases:

  /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=hostname -update
  

• In your web browser, go to the url:

  http://hostname/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=hostname
  

• Study the stats in quiet awe
• Edit crontab to update stats automatically every night:

  crontab -e
  0 1 * * * /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=hostname -update