GoAccess setup for Nginx sites

This post is a straightforward technical description of my GoAccess setup. GoAccess is a neat tool to monitor visits to your pages without deploying complex metrics and log parsing systems. GoAccess reports are pretty, detailed and clear. The problem is it’s not a plug-and-play utility, like Dozzle which is a freaking great service to handle your Docker containers. GoAccess basically just provides you with reports and you have to (or have a privilege to) figure out how to use them on your own. So here is my setup description and probably a guide to my future self willing to add more pages to be monitored.

I use Nginx to configure my web sites, so most examples assume it, but it probably should work the same with any other proxy server.

Separate access log for each site #

Add to the Nginx host config:

server {
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access-site-name.log;
}

Restart Nginx:

systemctl restart nginx.service

Log rotation #

If the new log path is configured as above, logrotate will likely pick it up automatically. To check:

View the logrotate config and find the Nginx logs:

less /etc/logrotate.d/nginx

Run logrotate in debug mode to look for the log:

logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf --debug

Check the logrotate status (your site might not be listed yet):

cat /var/lib/logrotate/status

Unified report viewing domain #

This step is done only once during initial setup.

To view reports for all my sites in one place, I set up a dedicated Nginx server just for GoAccess reports. I added Basic Auth for access control.

Create a Basic Auth password file:

htpasswd -c /etc/nginx/reports.htpasswd admin

Nginx config:

server {
    server_name          reports.kmiziz.xyz;
    auth_basic           "Administrator’s Area";
    auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/reports.htpasswd;

    location / {
        root /var/www/reports.kmiziz.xyz;
        index index.html;
        autoindex on;
    }
}

Enable the new site:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/reports /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Restart Nginx:

systemctl restart nginx.service

Enable SSL (see this guide):

certbot --nginx -d reports.kmiziz.xyz

Running GoAccess #

I didn’t manage to monitor multiple sites in parallel using --daemonize and realtime mode. For some reason running 2+ GoAccess processes resulted in only one of them actually working and other silently terminating.

So I decided to generate static reports via cron, as suggested here. I adapted the author’s script slightly:

#!/bin/bash

# List of domain names
sites=(
  "muckraker"
  "myblog"
)

# Directory where Nginx logs are stored
log_dir="/var/log/nginx"

# Directory where the reports will be saved
report_dir="/var/www/reports.kmiziz.xyz/reports"

for site in "${sites[@]}"; do
  echo "Generating report for $domain..."

  # Run goaccess for each domain
  sudo bash -c "(zcat -f ${log_dir}/access-${site}.log*.gz; cat ${log_dir}/access-${site}.log*) | goaccess - -o ${report_dir}/${site}.html --log-format=COMBINED"

  echo "Report for $domain saved to ${report_dir}/${site}.html"
done

echo "All reports generated."

I run this script every 30 minutes. That’s frequent enough for me.