Jul 10 2007
Awstats on Tomcat
Added on September 4th, 2008
The original war file is no longer available, please find a copy here
I’ve found this little tutorial two years ago and it helps me a lot with awstats on tomcat, i hope it can be useful for you….
AwStats
Author: John Smith (first website found) it seems to have a mirror here
Tomcat statistics
Requirements
- Perl 5.2 or above
- Tomcat 5 (I can’t see any reason for Tomcat 4 not to work, I haven’t tried it, though)
- awstats.war file (see downloads) >> The original war file is no longer available, please find a copy here
Changing Tomcat access logs format
Tomcat access logs format isn’t exactly what we need. We could also have modified AWStats configuration files, but with the loss of important information. Thus, let’s make Tomcat logs compatible with AWStats. Logs are configured in [Tomcat_install]/conf/server.xml. They might look something like:
<Valve className=“org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve” directory=“logs” prefix=“localhost_access_log.” suffix=“.txt” pattern=“common” resolveHosts=“false”/>
Normally this lines are commented. Just take in mind they should appear, uncommented, within your Host definition.
We will replace the valve definition with this one:
<Valve className=“org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve” directory=“logs” prefix=“www_mydomain_com_access_log.” suffix=“.log” pattern=“combined” fileDateFormat=“dd-MM-yy” resolveHosts=“false”/>
Enable Perl scripts
Tomcat has disabled by default CGI executions. This is because CGIs do not conform Tomcat security box. But we know exactly what we are going to do, aren’t we ….. ?
The only thing you need to do is renaming [Tomcat_install]/server/lib/servlets-cgi.renametojar to [Tomcat_install]/server/lib/servlets-cgi.jar. This will enable AWStats Perl scripts to execute on Tomcat server. When it’s done, restart Tomcat.
There is something more done through awstats.war file’s web.xml. You might want to look at this file once downloaded.
Install AWStats
AWStats is included in awstats.war file, therefore you will not need to install AWStats by hand.
Deploy awstats.war file. Will suffice copying this file into [Tomca_install]/webapps folder, but in case your Tomcat is configured not to auto-deploy war files, unzip it yourself. By default would create an [Tomca_install]/webapps/awstats folder.
Although you could change default context, isn’t a good idea. At least not to start with. Better make it work and then think about changing things.
Configure AWStats
This is the hardest part, did you already take a coffe?
First we will make some assumptions, are these ones:
- awstats.war was deployed into
/awstatsdefault context. See Install AWStats. - Our domain is
www.mydomain.com.
Now, go to [Tomca_install]/webapps/awstats/WEB-INF/cgi-bin folder. Next instructions make the assumption this is your current working folder.
- Copy
awstats.model.confintoawstats.www.mydomain.com.conf. - Edit
awstats.www.mydomain.com.conf.
You can use any text editor of your preference. Now, we will change some file default values. You must look for the attributes and change their values as shown below:
LogFile="[TI]/webapps/awstats/WEB-INF/tools/logresolvemerge.pl [TI]/logs/*.log |" LogType=W LogFormat=1 LogSeparator=" " SiteDomain="www.mydomain.com" DNSLookup=1 DirData="." DirCgi="/cgi-bin" DirIcons="/awstats/icon"
Remember replacing [TI] with full path to Tomcat. And www.mydomain.com with your domain name.
Update site statistics.
Here you have two choices:
- Set
AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=1inawstats.www.mydomain.com.conffile, see above. This will allow updating from the web browser with:http://www.mydomain.com/awstats/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=www.mydomain.com&update=1. - Using Telnet or SSH, go to
[Tom ca_install]/webapps/awstats/WEB-INF/cgi-binfolder and runperl awstats.pl -config=www.mydomain.com -update.
View site statistics.
Type http://www.mydomain.com/awstats/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=www.mydomain.com. That was all.
Creating separated domain statistics.
From the instructions above, everything is valid for creating separated domain statistics, except for one thing:
Inside your awstats.www.mydomain.com.conf we said:
LogFile=“[TI]/webapps/awstats/WEB-INF/tools/logresolvemerge.pl [TI]/logs/*.log |”
This line was gathering the whole set of log files, and this is against having statistics appart for each domain. We should replace this line to match the log files for the corresponding domain, as we said when changing Tomcat access logs format:
LogFile=“[TI]/webapps/awstats/WEB-INF/tools/logresolvemerge.pl [TI]/logs/www_mydomain_com*.log |”
Important! Don’t omit the asterisk in pointing the log files. Take in mind that Tomcat will create an access log file for each day, and that final file’s name will include the date.

