wusage 3.0.2

Version 3.0 has been extensively rewritten. It is not so much enhanced as made far more stable and very easy to install:

What's New in version 2.5!

Support for the new common log file format.. Those of you who have just upgraded to NCSA httpd 1.2 will note that wusage has stopped working. This is because the log file format has changed. The first line of your wusage.conf file now most likely reads either NCSA or CERN; change it to COMMON, if you have the latest version of either server. Note that data in the old format can't be read once you do this, and will be ignored. If you've been running wusage all along, this is not a problem, since you already have reports for all previous weeks; you may need to fudge your results a bit for the one week during which you switched servers.

One-line but extremely important bug fix in wusage.c! I deleted a critical line between version 2.1 and 2.2. Mea culpa.

Bug fixes in several places. Sites with less than one week of data should work fine now (of course the graph is rather dull with no data points, wait a week or two); meaningful error messages should appear for missing directories.

A reference to an out-of-date version of pbmplus found in the only US link in my short collection of sites was removed and replaced with a reference to a site that has the real thing. The out-of-date version was inadequate to support wusage.

Compatibility fixes for yet more compilers.

As always, if you have problems, contact me and I'll do my best to get you (and others with similar setups) up and running.

Version 2.1 now includes support for the CERN httpd as well as the NCSA httpd. You should insert the line

NCSA_HTTPD

or

CERN_HTTPD

at the beginning of the wusage.conf file, as appropriate. (For backwards compatibility, wusage will assume NCSA if this line is absent.)

Version 2.1 corrects a bug in the use of wild cards: wild cards at the beginning of an entry in one of the exclusion lists now work properly (so entries such as "*.gif" are now correctly processed).

First, and most important- version 2.0 is now compatible with all, or nearly all, versions of Unix! Version 2.0 relied on certain time-handling routines that did not exist in non-Sun versions of Unix. These have been replaced.

wusage 2.5 is copyright 1993, 1994, Quest Protein Database Center, Cold Spring Harbor Labs. Permission granted to copy and distribute this work provided that this notice remains intact. Modified versions should be cleared through Quest first; if this is not done, any modified version of the program must be clearly labeled as such.

The Quest Protein Database Center is funded under Grant P41-RR02188 by the National Institutes of Health.

What is wusage?

wusage maintains usage statistics for a WWW server. Specifically, it updates the following information, week by week:

• Total server usage, each week
• "Index" usage, each week (responses to ISINDEX pages)
• The top ten sites by frequency of access, each week
• The top ten documents accessed, each week
• A graph of server usage over many weeks
• An "icon" version of the graph for your home page!

What else do I need to use wusage?

To use wusage, you will need the following:

• The NCSA or CERN httpd World Wide Web server, or any "common logfile format" server
• A C compiler (any compiler should now work, even pre-ANSI K&R C)

In order to build wusage, first untar the wusage.tar file with the following command:

uncompress wusage3.0.2.tar.Z
tar -xf wusage3.0.2.tar

cd to this directory and examine the Makefile, which you may need to change slightly. Specifically, if you are using a different C compiler which is not named or aliased to "cc" (this is quite uncommon), change

CC=cc

CC=acc

Now, to build the package, just type "make all". If all goes well, the program "wusage" will be compiled and linked without incident.

There are several parameters which must be set in order for wusage to properly interact with your server. These are set in the file wusage.conf. A sample wusage.conf file is included in the tarfile, and you can use this file as a starting point. You will definitely need to edit this file to configure wusage properly for your server unless it is identical to ours.

Here is the sample wusage.conf file. Note that lines beginning with "#" are comments and are ignored. Note also that blank lines are NOT considered comments and should be avoided.

#Type of server log: COMMON (all new servers), NCSA_HTTPD or CERN_HTTPD.
#The latter two are for older versions of those servers; newer versions
# use the COMMON log file format.
COMMON
#Name of your server as it should be presented
Quest
#Directory where html pages generated by usage program should be located
/home/www/web/usage
#Directory where wusage and usagegraph are installed
/home/www
#URL to which locations of html pages should be appended for usage reports
#(the same as the first line, but in web space, not filesystem space)
/usage
#URL of server home page (a local URL is adequate)
/index.html
#Path of ncsa httpd log file
/home/www/ncsa/logs/access_log
#Path where pbmplus utilities are installed
/usr/local/bin
#Hidden items
{
}
#Ignored items
{
}
#Ignored sites
{
}

The first non-comment line should read:

COMMON

or

NCSA_HTTPD

or

CERN_HTTPD

Note to those upgrading: once you switch to the COMMON log file setting, wusage can't read any data in the old format that may be lying around, but it can skip over it tactfully. The upshot of this is that if you've been running wusage all along, you'll simply be able to start using it again and will only need to adjust the results for the one week during which you made the changeover to a common-logfile-format server version.

For those using wusage for the first time, this is a thornier problem, but it can be handled with some ingenuity (by switching the setting of the first line after running wusage on the pre-common format part of your log, then deleting the older content). I encourage server authors (and anyone else for that matter!) to write a conversion filter to translate old-style log file formats to the new style. It shouldn't be very difficult. At worst, you'll have statistics only from the point at which you switched to a common-logfile-format server.

The second non-comment line should contain the name of your server as you would like it to be referred to in the usage page.

The third line contains the directory in your file system in which html pages generated by wusage should reside. This will usually be a subdirectory of your server root directory called "usage". (In our case, SERVER_ROOT is /home/www/web.)

IMPORTANT: this directory should not be shared with other information! Please give usage a subdirectory to itself, since it creates and deletes files fairly freely and assumes its directory is a safe place in which to do so.

The fourth line is the "base URL" for html pages generated by wusage. This is similar to the second line, but is the location in web space, not in filesystem space. Thus, if SERVER_ROOT is /home/www/web and you set the second line to /home/www/web/usage, the fourth line should be set to just /usage.

The fifth line should be the location of your server's home page, to which a link "up" will be created on the main usage page. Again, this is its location in web space; the most common setting for this line is /index.html.

The lines above are followed by three lists of items, enclosed by { and } characters. By default, these lists are empty. The absence of the lists is tolerated for backwards compatibility.

The first is a list of items which should be "hidden". This means that they will still register in the total number of accesses, but they will never be in the top ten for any week.

The second is a list of items which should be "ignored". These items never appear in the total number of accesses OR in the top ten-- they are completely ignored.

The third is a list of sites to be ignored. This is useful if many of the accesses to your server are made by you personally and you are more interested in counting accesses made by other sites.

For instance, if you want to keep .gif files (frequently inline) out of the top ten, completely ignore files coming from users' personal directories, and ignore accesses from your own site "here.com", the three lists would look as follows. (Note that asterisks are acceptable as wild cards, just as they are in the file system; question marks are also acceptable to substitute for any single character.)

#Hidden items
{
*.gif
}
#Ignored items
{
/~*
}
#Ignored sites
{
here.com
}

There are three common ways to run wusage: as an automatic weekly job, by hand, and through a cgi script (which allows you to have a "button" on one of your web pages to update the information).

An automatic weekly job is the best approach, since this is the frequency with which wusage generates reports. If you are using a Unix system, it is easy to do this using the program "cron".

wusage needs to be run on a weekly basis in order to keep useful statistics. Specifically, it should be run as soon after midnight on Sunday as possible. For the purposes of creating an html report, wusage should always be run with this ONE option (this is a change from versions before 3.0):

-c (location of wusage.conf file)

You can simply run wusage by hand with the -c option (example: wusage -c wusage.conf). You will need to do so once a week.

To run it from a cgi script, create a cgi script which executes the above command and echoes back a reasonable page to the user indicating success. (Since reports are weekly no matter how often the program is run, it is recommended that such a button be placed on a private page, since it has no dramatic effect and need not be run incessantly by users.)

In order to install wusage as a regularly-scheduled automatically-run program, you need to add it to your crontab file and submit it to the program "crontab". Our crontab file looks like this:

1 0 * * 0 /home/www/wusage -c /home/www/wusage.conf
... other jobs, if any ...

crontab crontab.txt

Of course, if you run the www server as root, you no doubt already have a crontab file for root, to which you will want to add this line, following this with a reinstall using crontab. (We created a separate www account to facilitate this sort of thing; I recommend this strategy to other server administrators.)

Everything else is taken care of; all that remains is to run wusage for the first time (to make sure the various html and .gif files actually exist) and linking the usage report to your home page. Run wusage by hand using the following command:

wusage -c /home/www/wusage.conf

Now, if all has gone well, edit your home page to include a link to the usage report. Here is the relevant excerpt from our home page:

<P>Usage of the Quest WWW server is kept track of through
<A HREF="http:/usage/index.html">
<IMG ALIGN=TOP SRC="http:/usage/usage.graph.small.gif"></A>
 <A HREF="http:/usage/index.html">usage statistics</A>.</P>

Your access_log file will grow tremendously over time, particularly if your server is heavily used. It is desirable to purge this file periodically, and this can be done provided you follow these directions.

Take note of the most recent week for which wusage has generated a complete report. Determine the date on which this week ended (the usage report displays the date the week began).

Now edit your access_log file and find the first entry that falls AFTER the completion of that week. It is safe to delete all entries BEFORE that line in the access_log file.