How to Install GoAccess and Nginx as Web Analyzer on Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS

Hi all. On this occasion I will share how to install GoAccess on Linux Ubuntu combined with Nignx.

Do you know what GoAccess is? GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal or through your browser. 

It provides fast and valuable HTTP statistics for system administrators that require a visual server report on the fly.

Preparation

I created a directory that will be used as root on the vhost that I will create, not only that, I will use the directory for the converted files with goaccess.

$ sudo mkdir -p /apps/monitoring/goaccess

Installing

Just install nginx and goaccess like the command below.

$ sudo apt-get install nginx

$ sudo apt-get install goaccess

Configure

Nginx

Here I create a vhost with the direction of the path that I have made above.

$ sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/goaccess.conf

server {

        listen 1234;

        server_name goaccess;
        root /apps/monitoring/goaccess;
        index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
      
        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
}

$ sudo chown www-data.www-data /apps/ -R 

Change Owner and Group to www-data

$ sudo nginx -t
$ sudo systemctl restart nginx
$ sudo systemctl enable nginx
$ sudo systemctl status nginx 

GoAccess

Next we will parse an access log. Here I already have an access log for example. And parsed with GoAccess to html format which will later be accessed with nginx.

$ sudo goaccess kitska_access.log --log-format=COMBINED -a -o /apps/monitoring/goaccess/report.html

Trying

In order to view the generated HTML report, simply navigate to report.html using your web browser.

Report.html GoAccess

Maybe that's all I can share with you guys, hopefully this article will be useful.

Thank You