GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that *runs in a terminal in nix systems. It provides fast and valuable HTTP statistics for system administrators that require a visual server report on the fly. More info at: http://goaccess.io.

GoAccess parses the specified web log file and outputs the data to the X terminal. Features include:

• General Statistics, bandwidth, etc.
• Time taken to serve the request (useful to track pages that are slowing down your site)
• Metrics for cumulative, average and slowest running requests
• Top Visitors
• Requested files
• Requested static files, images, swf, js, etc.
• 404 or Not Found
• Hosts, Reverse DNS, IP Location
• Operating Systems
• Browsers and Spiders
• Referring Sites
• Referrers URLs
• Keyphrases
• Geo Location - Continent/Country/City
• Visitors Time Distribution
• HTTP Status Codes
• Ability to output HTML, JSON and CSV
• Tailor GoAccess to suit your own color taste/schemes
• Incremental log processing
• Support for large datasets and data persistence
• Support for IPv6
• Output statistics to HTML. See report.

GoAccess allows any custom log format string. Predefined options include, but not limited to:

• Amazon CloudFront (Download Distribution).
• AWS Elastic Load Balancing
• Combined Log Format (XLF/ELF) Apache | Nginx
• Common Log Format (CLF) Apache
• Google Cloud Storage.
• Apache virtual hosts
• W3C format (IIS).

The main idea behind GoAccess is being able to quickly analyze and view web server statistics in real time without having to generate an HTML report (great if you want to do a quick analysis of your access log via SSH).

Although it is possible to generate an HTML, JSON and CSV report, by default it outputs to a terminal.

You can see it more of a monitor command tool than anything else.

GoAccess can be compiled and used on *nix systems.

Download, extract and compile GoAccess with:

$ wget http://tar.goaccess.io/goaccess-0.9.4.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf goaccess-0.9.4.tar.gz
$ cd goaccess-0.9.4/
$ ./configure --enable-geoip --enable-utf8
$ make
# make install

$ git clone https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess.git
$ cd goaccess
$ autoreconf -fiv
$ ./configure --enable-geoip --enable-utf8
$ make
# make install

It is easiest to install GoAccess on Linux using the preferred package manager of your Linux distribution.

Please note that not all distributions will have the lastest version of GoAccess available

# apt-get install goaccess

NOTE: It is likely this will install an outdated version of GoAccess. To make sure that you're running the latest stable version of GoAccess see alternative option below.

$ echo "deb http://deb.goaccess.io $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
$ wget -O - http://deb.goaccess.io/gnugpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install goaccess

# yum install goaccess

# pacman -S goaccess

# emerge net-analyzer/goaccess

# brew install goaccess

# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/goaccess/ && make install clean
# pkg install sysutils/goaccess

# cd /usr/ports/www/goaccess && make install clean
# pkg_add goaccess

# pkgin install goaccess

GoAccess can be used in Windows through Cygwin.

There are three storage options that can be used with GoAccess. Choosing one will depend on your environment and needs.

On-memory storage provides better performance at the cost of limiting the dataset size to the amount of available physical memory. By default GoAccess uses GLib Hash Tables. If your dataset can fit in memory, then this will perform fine. It has average memory usage and pretty good performance. For better performance with memory trade-off see Tokyo Cabinet on-memory hash database.

Use this storage method for large datasets where it is not possible to fit everything in memory. The B+ tree database is slower than any of the hash databases since data has to be committed to disk. However, using an SSD greatly increases the performance. You may also use this storage method if you need data persistence to quickly load statistics at a later date.

Although this may vary across different systems, in general the on-memory hash database should perform slightly better than GLib Hash Tables.

The following options can be supplied to the command or specified in the configuration file. If specified in the configuration file, long options need to be used without prepending --.

The simplest and fastest usage would be:

# goaccess -f access.log

That will generate an interactive text-only output.

To generate full statistics we can run GoAccess as:

# goaccess -f access.log -a

To generate an HTML report:

# goaccess -f access.log -a > report.html

To generate a JSON file:

# goaccess -f access.log -a -d -o json > report.json

To generate a CSV file:

# goaccess -f access.log -o csv > report.csv

The -a flag indicates that we want to process an agent-list for every host parsed.

The -d flag indicates that we want to enable the IP resolver on the HTML | JSON output. (It will take longer time to output since it has to resolve all queries.)

The -c flag will prompt the date and log format configuration window. Only when curses is initialized.

Filtering can be done through the use of pipes. For instance, using grep to filter specific data and then pipe the output into GoAccess. This adds a great amount of flexibility to what GoAccess can display. For example:

If we would like to process all access.log.*.gz we can do:

# zcat access.log.*.gz | goaccess
OR
# zcat -f access.log* | goaccess

(On Mac OS X, use gunzip -c instead of zcat).

Another useful pipe would be filtering dates out of the web log

The following will get all HTTP requests starting on 05/Dec/2010 until the end of the file.

# sed -n '/05\/Dec\/2010/,$ p' access.log | goaccess -a

If we want to parse only a certain time-frame from DATE a to DATE b, we can do:

# sed -n '/5\/Nov\/2010/,/5\/Dec\/2010/ p' access.log | goaccess -a

To exclude a list of virtual hosts you can do the following:

# grep -v "`cat exclude_vhost_list_file`" vhost_access.log | goaccess

For more examples, please check GoAccess' man page: http://goaccess.io/man

Any help on GoAccess is welcome. The most helpful way is to try it out and give feedback. Feel free to use the Github issue tracker and pull requests to discuss and submit code changes.

Enjoy!