What is it?

According to the project’s website,

GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems or through your browser.

Also, “It provides fast and valuable HTTP statistics for system administrators that require a visual server report on the fly”.

Some features are:

• Fast, real-time, millisecond/second updates, written in C
• Only ncurses as a dependency
• Nearly all web log formats (Apache, Nginx, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, etc)
• Simply set the log format and run it against your log
• Beautiful terminal and bootstrap dashboards (Tailor GoAccess to suit your own color taste/schemes)
• and of course, Valgrind tested.

Installing GoAccess on Ubuntu 20.04 / Debian 10

GoAccess is available in the official Ubuntu repositories, so the installation is quite simple but it is convenient to have the latest version available. So, you have to add the GoAccess repository.

To do this, open a terminal and execute the following commands:

echo "deb http://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 --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/goaccess.gpg add -

Now refresh the APT cache:

sudo apt update

And performs the installation running:

sudo apt install goaccess
Reading package lists… Done
 Building dependency tree       
 Reading state information… Done
 The following additional packages will be installed:
   libmaxminddb0 libncursesw5 libtinfo5
 Suggested packages:
   mmdb-bin
 Recommended packages:
   libgpm2
 The following NEW packages will be installed:
   goaccess libmaxminddb0 libncursesw5 libtinfo5
 0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 28 not upgraded.
 Need to get 833 kB of archives.
 After this operation, 2,025 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

If you want, you ca check the installed version:

goaccess --version
GoAccess - 1.4.6.
 For more details visit: https://goaccess.io/
 Copyright (C) 2009-2020 by Gerardo Orellana
And so you can get GoAccess, now let's use it a little.

Using GoAccess on Ubuntu 20.04 / Debian 10

The first thing you can do is check the help that the terminal gives us, for that you can run:

goaccess --help

On the other hand, the most basic way to use goaccess is simply by specifying a log file.

goaccess /var/log/apache2/access.log

Or you can select the log of your Virtualhost.

There you will be shown a screen in the terminal where you can choose the log output format.

In my case, I have chosen the third option (CLF).

And immediately it will start the analysis.

Note: I am working with a home test server. Therefore, there is not so much activity in the log.

But you can also specify a log format to make it work with, for example, squid. Although we recommend that you read the official documentation

A very interesting option is to display it directly on your web browser. I think this is the best possible option.

sudo goaccess /var/log/apache2/access.log --log-format=COMBINED -a -o /var/www/html/file.html

And this will generate a file that you can open from the browser. Remember to modify the name of the output file.

And this is the basic use of GoAccess as we see is a basic but very useful tool.

Conclusion

Having a program that can analyze logs graphically and interactively is an advantage for all of us who work on Linux. That’s why today we wanted to show you GoAccess.

So, share this post and join our Telegram channel and our Facebook page. Also, buy us a coffee 😉

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