Webalizer installation and use on Debian

This is a simple guide on how to install Webalizer on a Debian system equipped with Apache. This should work for every version of every three elements (Debian, Apache and Webalizer) all together. Webalizer is a statistics application which analyses the Apache logs (in /var/log/apache) and makes a graphical output in web format, using the libgd libraries. Please note that we, at BeezNest, tend now to prefer AWStats to Webalizer because we feel it is better in every aspect. To install Webalizer:

# apt-get install webalizer

The version tested asks for libgd2 to be installed. The configuration of Webalizer is pretty easy for a totally clean system. You are just asked two questions:

• where will Webalizer keep its data? (default: /var/www/webalizer)
• what title will the output page display? (defaults to something common)

When installed, a simple execution of webalizer will generate the Webalizer files. To make this generation automatic, you'll need to add a cron script in /etc/cron.daily for example. If for any reason your log files are not kind of /var/log/apache/access.log, the execution of Webalizer will stop before doing the export and you will get the following error:

• No valid records found!

you should edit /etc/webalizer.conf and change the corresponding settings to your log file, then try again to start webalizer. Now you can access your stats by reaching the web server directory in which you asked Webalizer to store its data (default: http://www.yoursite.ext/webalizer/) There are many additional statistical options you can set. To know about them, a very good start is to read the comments in /etc/webalizer.conf

This article was first written in November 2003 for
the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/95)