My web server blocks access to my apache-generated visitor logs (commonly stored in “access.log”). Therefore, many great site usage stats generators (such as awstats – see this example) cannot be used to analyze web traffic to my site. (How many people go what pages? Where do they come from? What search phrases do they type into Google to find my website?) My web host does allow PHP, and access to php.ini, so I figured that I could generate my own access.log using PHP code. I succeeded, but had a hard time doing this because it’s not clearly documented elsewhere – so I’ll make it clear.

Sample line from access.log generated by my PHP script:
132.170.10.227 – - [22/Jan/2009:11:58:49 +0800] “GET /blog/2005-06-29-eva-05-attack-scotts-sanity/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 – “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=8Lk&q=swharden+eva-05&btnG=Search” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5″

All I had to do was insert the following line at the end of my php.ini file:

 auto_append_file = "/home/content/n/i/b/nibjb/html/logme.php"  
 

And I placed logme.php in my root folder with the following code:

 $logwriter_logformat = "combined"; // log format,combined or common  
 $logwriter_logdir = "/home/content/n/i/b/nibjb/html/logs/"; // physical path where your log file located  
 $logwriter_logfilename = "access.log"; // your log file's filename  
 $logwriter_timezone = "+0800"; // your server's time zone. +0800 means GMT+8  

 function logwriter_writelog($logstring){  

 global $logwriter_logdir,$logwriter_logfilename;  
 $fullpathfilename = $logwriter_logdir.$logwriter_logfilename;  

 if (!is_file($fullpathfilename)) {  
 print "Log file doesn't exist or file is corrupt.";  
 return;  
 }  

 if (!is_writeable($fullpathfilename)) {  
 print "Log file is not writable,please change its permission.";  
 return;  
 }  

 if($fp = @fopen($fullpathfilename, "a")) {  
 flock($fp, 2);  
 fputs($fp, $logstring);  
 fclose($fp);  
 }  
 }  

 function logwriter_handlevar($varname,$defaultvalue) {  
 $tempvar = getenv($varname);  
 if(!empty($tempvar)) {  
 return $tempvar;  
 } else {  
 return $defaultvalue;  
 }  
 }  

 if (!empty($REMOTE_HOST)) {  
 $logwriter_remote_vistor = $REMOTE_HOST;  
 }else{  
 $logwriter_remote_vistor = logwriter_handlevar("REMOTE_ADDR","-");  
 }  

 $logwriter_remote_ident = logwriter_handlevar("REMOTE_IDENT","-");  
 $logwriter_remote_user = logwriter_handlevar("REMOTE_USER","-");  
 $logwriter_date = date("d/M/Y:H:i:s");  

 $logwriter_server_port = logwriter_handlevar("SERVER_PORT","80");  
 if($logwriter_server_port!="80") {  
 $logwriter_server_port =   
 }else{  
 $logwriter_server_port = "";  
 }  

 $logwriter_request_method = logwriter_handlevar("REQUEST_METHOD","GET");  
 $logwriter_request_uri = logwriter_handlevar("REQUEST_URI","");  
 $logwriter_server_protocol = logwriter_handlevar("SERVER_PROTOCOL","HTTP/1.1");  

 if ($logwriter_logformat=="common") {  
 $logwriter_logstring = "$logwriter_remote_vistor $logwriter_remote_ident $logwriter_remote_user [$logwriter_date $logwriter_timezone] "$logwriter_request_method $logwriter_request_uri $logwriter_server_protocol" 200 - 
 ";  
 }else{  

 $logwriter_http_referer = logwriter_handlevar("HTTP_REFERER","-");  
 $logwriter_http_user_agent = logwriter_handlevar("HTTP_USER_AGENT","");  

 $logwriter_logstring = "$logwriter_remote_vistor $logwriter_remote_ident $logwriter_remote_user [$logwriter_date $logwriter_timezone] "$logwriter_request_method $logwriter_request_uri $logwriter_server_protocol" 200 - "$logwriter_http_referer" "$logwriter_http_user_agent" 
 ";  

 }  

 logwriter_writelog($logwriter_logstring);  
 

Note that the PHP code must be surrounded with < ? php ?> as demonstrated here

The result? As you can tell, my logme.php dumps data to www.swharden.com/logs/access.log – if you browse a few pages on my website, or even use Google to search for me (ie: google for ’swharden’ and ‘minidisc’) you can see yourself in the logfile – pretty cool huh? Once I have a good volume of log data I’ll demonstrate how to turn it into useful information.

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