Segmentation Fault: Core dumped..;-)

HOWTO: Using AWStats, Sourceforge’s June project of the month

Posted : June 25, 2004 at 2:59 am [America/Los_Angeles]

Got an email from Sourceforge.net team announcing that AWStats project was named Project of the month in June. Frankly, I am not surprised at all. I personally use it on more than a few sites and would highly recommend it to everybody.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty HOWTO on using AWStats with Apache2 on Linux. YMMV.

1. Setup a user account called ‘awstats’. You will be setting up a few crons under this account.
   
   (root)>useradd awstats
   
   (root)>passwd awstats (set up a password)

2. Download the tar/gzipped file:
   
   (root)>wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/awstats/awstats-6.1.tgz

3. (root)>tar -xvzf awstats-6.1.tgz
4. cp -r awstats-6.1 /usr/local/awstats
5. mkdir -p /etc/awstats
6. Create a AWStats conf file in /etc/awstats folder. If your site is named mysite.com, name the conf file exactly like awstats.mysite.conf. Of course, you can replace ‘mysite’ with ‘dubya’ for all I care, but you will need this later. So, remember what you use and name the conf file as shown - awstats.mysite.conf
   
   Note:
   
   The config settings you might want to tweak (based on your web server setup) are: LogFile, LogFormat, SiteDomain, HostAliases, DirData (I usually set this up to point to a folder in my web server docroot. for example, /usr/local/apache/htdocs/wwwstats) and DirIcons.
   Here’s a sample config file that you can download and tweak to suit your needs.

7. Create the DataDir folder:
   
   (root)>mkdir -p /usr/local/apache/htdocs/wwwstats/data
   
   (root)>chown -R awstats.awstats /usr/local/apache/htdocs/wwwstats

8. Now, we’re all set to setup the cron program. Let’s create a folder for hosting the cron shell script:
   
   (awstats)>mkdir -p /home/awstats/cron

9. Download and save this bash shell script in ~awstats/cron as run.sh. Pay special attention to the ‘mysite’ function defined in the script. Notice the -config parameter being passed to both the AWStats Perl scripts. If you used ‘dubya’ in naming conf file in Step 6 above, that’s what goes here!
   
   (awstats)>cd ~awstats/cron
   
   (awstats)>chmod 755 run.sh

10. To set it up as cron, create a text file with this line:
    
    0 * * * * /home/awstats/cron/run.sh mysite > /tmp/awstats-mysite.log 2>&1
    
    This ensures that your cron will run at the top of every hour. Feel free to tweak it to suit your needs. Save this as cron.txt in ~awstats/. To add this to the crontab of ‘awstats’ user, run:
    
    (awstats)>crontab cron.txt

11. Run the cron manually once as follows:
    
    (awstats)>/home/awstats/cron/run.sh mysite > /tmp/awstats-mysite.log 2>&1
    
    (awstats)>cat /tmp/awstats-mysite.log (to look at the output generated by the cron)
    
    If everything worked well, you should have reports generated in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/wwwstats folder

12. One last thing: You will have to setup a context (as shown below) in your Apache web server httpd.conf file:
    
    Alias /awstats “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot”
    
    <Directory “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot”>
    
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    
    AllowOverride None
    
    Order allow,deny
    
    Allow from all
    
    </Directory>

13. Point your browser to http://mysite.com/wwwstats/awstats.mysite.html
    
    NOTE:
    
    You might want to setup an alias for the file awstats.mysite.html called index.html in the wwwstats/ folder. This will make your life a little easier in accessing the stats using something like http://mysite.com/wwwstats

14. That’s it!

Enjoy!

- Anand

Category: Services and Software