AWStats: Set up the Config File

The AWStats config file is explained in this step.

Steps

1. Acquire AWStats, other programs, and pertinent information
2. Install AWStats on the 1and1 shared server
3. Install AWStats on your computer
4. Set up the AWStats config file
5. Create a usable log file
6. Create/update the AWStats database
7. Create a traffic web page
8. Create report batch files
9. Analyze the traffic page
10. Tasks

Extending AWStats

1. Extras
2. Geographic Plug-ins
3. How To

Help

1. Glossary
2. FAQ
3. Pages not found FAQ
4. Stop Referrer Spam

Prologue

I do not use the AWStats configuration wizard since it does not cover many of the configuration options and I have several config files.

I have 4 config files for offline reporting and 1 config file for online reporting. The offline config files are for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly reporting. The single online config file is for today reporting.

• awstats.today.conf
• awstats.daily.conf
• awstats.weekly.conf
• awstats.monthly.conf
• awstats.yearly.conf

DOCROOT - path to your awstats directory on the server
LOCALPATH - path to your awstats directory on your computer
FILELOCALPATH - special path to your AWStat's icon directory. In order to accommodate FireFox I had to put file:/// in front of the LOCALPATH so the icons appear in the static reports. All browsers I tested worked fine.

Config File Differences

The differences are listed below:

daily (offline)

AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=0
LogFile="LOCALPATH\statlogs\access.daily.log"

weekly (offline)

AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=0
LogFile="LOCALPATH\statlogs\access.weekly.log"

monthly (offline)

AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=0
LogFile="LOCALPATH\statlogs\access.monthly.log"

yearly (offline)

AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=0
LogFile="LOCALPATH\statlogs\access.yearly.log"

today (offline)

AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=0
LogFile="LOCALPATH\statlogs\access.today.log"

today (online)

AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=1
LogFile="cat DOCROOT/logs/access.log.??.? |"
DirIcons="DOCROOT/wwwroot/icon"
DNSLookup=1

Set up the AWStats config file

AWStats uses a configuration file in text format and allows you to analyze any number of subdomains/subdirectories in a given hosting account. awstats.pl uses the config file for its operations. We use several different config files, depending on the timeline or the domain.

For example: In yourdomain.com you create a webpage for yourself (yourdomain.com/yourself) and one for your dog (yourdomain.com/yourdog). You can then configure AWStats to analyze your domain in total or both of your websites (yourself and yourdog) independently. In the latter case you need to create a config-file for each of your web directories (one for yourdomain.com/yourself and one for yourdomain.com/yourdog).

The config files are placed in awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/ directory. AWStats comes with a template (awstats.model.conf) which you can copy for each of your subdomains/subdirectories and which you have to edit according to your settings and needs. Rename the middle part of your config files according to your subdomains/subdirectories, e.g. awstats.yourself.conf and awstats.yourdog.conf:

Editing config file

This tutorial will only cover modifications to the config file that are either essential or of general interest, according to the author's opinion. There are many more options not mentioned here which allow you to further customize AWStats. In any case try to understand the modifications rather than just copying and pasting them.

Use a plain text editor, such as Notepad, rather than Word. Word will add a bunch of garbage to the config file.

Use absolute paths instead of relative ones.

The following modifications to the config file need to be done to analyze the 1and1 web server logfiles:

# is for comments in a config file.

Essential Changes

LogFile

LogFile="DOCROOT/awstats/statlogs/access.log"

LogFormat=%host %other %logname %time1 %methodurl 
					%code %bytesd %virtualname %refererquot %uaquot %otherquot

SiteDomain="yourdomain.com"

HostAliases="localhost 127.0.0.1 REGEX[myserver\.com$]"

HostAliases="localhost 127.0.0.1 www.mydomain.com"

DirData="DOCROOT/awstats/statdata"

DirCgi="DOCROOT/awstats/cgi-bin"

DirIcons="FILEDOCROOT/icon"

DirIcons="../icon"

OnlyFiles="REGEX[yourself\/]"

DefaultFile="index.php"

NotPageList

This is another important directive. Here we set what file extensions will not be counted as Page Views or Downloads, but only as Hits. Usually, this list includes files that are part of a web page (images, stylesheets, flash animations, java applets etc.). I have added many new ones onto the default.

NotPageList="css js class gif jpg jpeg png bmp ico swf zip tgz gz tar rss xml rdf"

Optional changes you may consider:

AllowAccessFromWebToAuthenticatedUsersOnly=1

AllowAccessFromWebToFollowingAuthenticatedUsers="uxxxxxxxx"

DNSLookup=0

CreateDirDataIfNotExists=0

CreateDirDataIfNotExists=1

AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=0

AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=1

AllowFullYearView=2

AllowFullYearView=3

KeepBackupOfHistoricFiles=1

It’s a good habit to have awstats keep a backup of the historic data during the update process.

SkipHosts

SkipHosts="OUR OWN PCs' HOSTNAMES"

This is a very important directive regarding the accuracy of the statistics. Usually, we are our web site’s most regular visitor and it’s obvious that we do not want to be counted as a visitor. This directive can take IP addresses or hostnames as values, separated with a space. Regular expressions can be used in the form of REGEX[value]. IP addresses cannot be mixed with hostnames, so, if the DNS lookups take place at the web server level, then we have to use hostnames as values, otherwise we have to use IP addresses. Usually we need to set the IPs or hostnames of all our LAN computers or computers we use to edit the website, so that they are ignored. Below are some examples:

SkipHosts="localhost REGEX[^.*\.example\.dyndns\.org$] test.mysite.com windowspc1"
OR
SkipHosts="127.0.0.1 REGEX[^192\.168\.] REGEX[^10\.]"

SkipUserAgents

SkipUserAgents=""

If you use any custom spiders or bots to test or analyze your web site, but you don’t want their access to be included in the stats, then you should add their "User Agent String" as a value to this directive. Again, regular expressions can be used in the form of REGEX[value].

URLWithQuery=0
URLWithQueryWithOnlyFollowingParameters=""
URLWithQueryWithoutFollowingParameters=""
URLReferrerWithQuery=0

These do not need to be modified, unless you want the query string to be included in the web page URLs or Referrer URLs in the traffic reports. Enabling the URLWithQuery directive is important in the case your web page URLs are of the form /index.php?p=10, so that it is clear in the traffic reports which page was viewed. On the other hand, if your page URLs are of the above form, but you use permalinks, then it’s not needed to modify the default values for these directives.
Including the query string in the referrer URLs is not important, in fact it can lead to lengthy meaningless referrer lists, which is not so convenient. I just provide this info here for completeness.

LevelForWormsDetection=2

By default, the detection of worms that have crawled your web site is disabled. You may want to enable this by setting the above directive’s value to 2.

Lang="en"

If you need the reports to be in a specific language, set it here. A list of supported languages exists in the configuration file.

ShowAuthenticatedUsers=PHBL

If your reports are private, you may set this directive’s value to PHBL (details about what each letter represents can be found inside the conf file), so that a section with details about your web site’s authenticated users is included in the reports.

ShowWormsStats=HBL

If you had previously enabled the worm detection, then you may want to include a detailed section about worms in the reports.

IncludeInternalLinksInOriginSection=1

By setting this to 1, a summary of how many links to another internal page have been followed from your site’s pages is included in the reports.

MaxNbOfDomain = 10
MaxNbOfHostsShown = 10
MaxNbOfLoginShown = 10
MaxNbOfRobotShown = 10
MaxNbOfPageShown = 10
MaxNbOfOsShown = 10
MaxNbOfBrowsersShown = 10
MaxNbOfRefererShown = 10
MaxNbOfKeyphrasesShown = 10
MaxNbOfKeywordsShown = 10

Here follows some info about the reports. You can create only one main page with a summary of the web site’s traffic, but you can also generate some supplemental pages which have full lists of the visited pages, referrers, countries, search engines etc. Each section in the main page includes a predefined number of entries that are displayed. For example, it displays by default the top 10 referrers. This number can be customized by modifying the directives above.

ShowLinksOnUrl=1

By default, each URL shown in the reports is a clickable hyperlink. If you do not want them to be actual hyperlinks, then set this to 0.

MaxRowsInHTMLOutput=1000
DetailedReportsOnNewWindows=1

With these directives you set the number of entries each of the supplemental reports can have and if you want these supplemental reports to be opened in a new browser window.

LoadPlugin="tooltips"
LoadPlugin="decodeutfkeys"

The AWStats package includes some plugins you can enable. I found the above two to be helpful. The first one enables the display of some descriptive tooltips and the second one makes it possible to show keywords and keyphrases correctly using national characters.

There are some other interesting plugins inside the AWStats package, but also some more from other contributors. You can find the latter at the project’s web site. Keep in mind, that each plugin may require certain Perl modules to be installed.

Next: Create Log File