LOG/DATE/TIME FORMAT

--time-format=<timeformat>

The time-format variable followed by a space, specifies the log format time containing either a name of a predefined format (see options below) or any combination of regular characters and special format specifiers.

They all begin with a percentage (%) sign. See `man strftime`. %T or %H:%M:%S.

Note that if a timestamp is given in microseconds, %f must be used as time-format. If the timestamp is given in milliseconds %* must be used as time-format.

--date-format=<dateformat>

The date-format variable followed by a space, specifies the log format time containing either a name of a predefined format (see options below) or any combination of regular characters and special format specifiers.

They all begin with a percentage (%) sign. See `man strftime`. %Y-%m-%d.

Note that if a timestamp is given in microseconds, %f must be used as date-format. If the timestamp is given in milliseconds %* must be used as date-format.

--log-format=<logformat>

The log-format variable followed by a space or \t for tab-delimited, specifies the log format string.

Note that if there are spaces within the format, the string needs to be enclosed in single/double quotes. Inner quotes need to be escaped.

In addition to specifying the raw log/date/time formats, for simplicity, any of the following predefined log format names can be supplied to the log/date/time-format variables. GoAccess can also handle one predefined name in one variable and another predefined name in another variable.

COMBINED - Combined Log Format, VCOMBINED - Combined Log Format with Virtual Host, COMMON - Common Log Format, VCOMMON - Common Log Format with Virtual Host, W3C - W3C Extended Log File Format, SQUID - Native Squid Log Format, CLOUDFRONT - Amazon CloudFront Web Distribution, CLOUDSTORAGE - Google Cloud Storage, AWSELB - Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, AWSS3 - Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) AWSALB - Amazon Application Load Balancer CADDY - Caddy's JSON Structured format

Note: Piping data into GoAccess won't prompt a log/date/time configuration dialog, you will need to previously define it in your configuration file or in the command line.

USER INTERFACE OPTIONS

-c --config-dialog

Prompt log/time/date configuration window on program start. Only when curses is initialized.

-i --hl-header

Color highlight active terminal panel.

-m --with-mouse

Enable mouse support on main terminal dashboard.

---color=<fg:bg[attrs, PANEL]>

Specify custom colors for the terminal output.

Color Syntax DEFINITION space/tab colorFG#:colorBG# [attributes,PANEL]

FG# = foreground color [-1...255] (-1 = default term color) BG# = background color [-1...255] (-1 = default term color)

Optionally, it is possible to apply color attributes (multiple attributes are comma separated), such as: bold, underline, normal, reverse, blink

If desired, it is possible to apply custom colors per panel, that is, a metric in the REQUESTS panel can be of color A, while the same metric in the BROWSERS panel can be of color B.

Available color definitions: COLOR_MTRC_HITS COLOR_MTRC_VISITORS COLOR_MTRC_DATA COLOR_MTRC_BW COLOR_MTRC_AVGTS COLOR_MTRC_CUMTS COLOR_MTRC_MAXTS COLOR_MTRC_PROT COLOR_MTRC_MTHD COLOR_MTRC_HITS_PERC COLOR_MTRC_HITS_PERC_MAX COLOR_MTRC_VISITORS_PERC COLOR_MTRC_VISITORS_PERC_MAX COLOR_PANEL_COLS COLOR_BARS COLOR_ERROR COLOR_SELECTED COLOR_PANEL_ACTIVE COLOR_PANEL_HEADER COLOR_PANEL_DESC COLOR_OVERALL_LBLS COLOR_OVERALL_VALS COLOR_OVERALL_PATH COLOR_ACTIVE_LABEL COLOR_BG COLOR_DEFAULT COLOR_PROGRESS

See configuration file for a sample color scheme.

--color-scheme=<1|2|3>

Choose among color schemes. 1 for the default grey scheme. 2 for the green scheme. 3 for the Monokai scheme (shown only if terminal supports 256 colors).

--crawlers-only

Parse and display only crawlers (bots).

--html-custom-css=<path/custom.css>

Specifies a custom CSS file path to load in the HTML report.

--html-custom-js=<path/custom.js>

Specifies a custom JS file path to load in the HTML report.

--html-report-title=<title>

Set HTML report page title and header.

--html-refresh=<secs>

Refresh the HTML report every X seconds. The value has to be between 1 and 60 seconds. The default is set to refresh the HTML report every 1 second.

--html-prefs=<JSON>

Set HTML report default preferences. Supply a valid JSON object containing the HTML preferences. It allows the ability to customize each panel plot. See example below.

Note: The JSON object passed needs to be a one line JSON string. For instance,

--html-prefs='{"theme":"bright","perPage":5,"layout":"horizontal","showTables":true,"visitors":{"plot":{"chartType":"bar"}}}'
    

--json-pretty-print

Format JSON output using tabs and newlines.

Note: This is not recommended when outputting a real-time HTML report since the WebSocket payload will much much larger.

--max-items=<number>

The maximum number of items to display per panel. The maximum can be a number between 1 and n.

Note: Only the CSV and JSON output allow a maximum number greater than the default value of 366 (or 50 in the real-time HTML output) items per panel.

--no-color

Turn off colored output. This is the default output on terminals that do not support colors.

--no-column-names

Don't write column names in the terminal output. By default, it displays column names for each available metric in every panel.

--no-csv-summary

Disable summary metrics on the CSV output.

--no-progress

Disable progress metrics [total requests/requests per second].

--no-tab-scroll

Disable scrolling through panels when TAB is pressed or when a panel is selected using a numeric key.

--no-html-last-updated

Do not show the last updated field displayed in the HTML generated report.

--no-parsing-spinner

Do now show the progress metrics and parsing spinner.

SERVER OPTIONS

--addr

Specify IP address to bind the server to. Otherwise it binds to 0.0.0.0.

Usually there is no need to specify the address, unless you intentionally would like to bind the server to a different address within your server.

--daemonize

Run GoAccess as daemon (only if --real-time-html enabled).

Note: It's important to make use of absolute paths across GoAccess' configuration.

--user-name=<username>

Run GoAccess as the specified user.

Note: It's important to ensure the user or the users' group can access the input and output files as well as any other files needed. Other groups the user belongs to will be ignored. As such it's advised to run GoAccess behind a SSL proxy as it's unlikely this user can access the SSL certificates.

--origin=<url>

Ensure clients send the specified origin header upon the WebSocket handshake.

--pid-file=<path/goaccess.pid>

Write the daemon PID to a file when used along the --daemonize option.

--port=<port>

Specify the port to use. By default GoAccess' WebSocket server listens on port 7890.

--real-time-html

Enable real-time HTML output.

GoAccess uses its own WebSocket server to push the data from the server to the client. See http://gwsocket.io for more details how the WebSocket server works.

--ws-url=<[scheme://]url[:port]>

URL to which the WebSocket server responds. This is the URL supplied to the WebSocket constructor on the client side.

Optionally, it is possible to specify the WebSocket URI scheme, such as ws:// or wss:// for unencrypted and encrypted connections. e.g., wss://goaccess.io

If GoAccess is running behind a proxy, you could set the client side to connect to a different port by specifying the host followed by a colon and the port. e.g., goaccess.io:9999

By default, it will attempt to connect to the generated report's hostname. If GoAccess is running on a remote server, the host of the remote server should be specified here. Also, make sure it is a valid host and NOT an http address.

--fifo-in=<path/file>

Creates a named pipe (FIFO) that reads from on the given path/file.

--fifo-out=<path/file>

Creates a named pipe (FIFO) that writes to the given path/file.

--ssl-cert=<cert.crt>

Path to TLS/SSL certificate. In order to enable TLS/SSL support, GoAccess requires that --ssl-cert and --ssl-key are used.

Only if configured using --with-openssl

--ssl-key=<priv.key>

Path to TLS/SSL private key. In order to enable TLS/SSL support, GoAccess requires that --ssl-cert and --ssl-key are used.

Only if configured using --with-openssl

FILE OPTIONS

-

The log file to parse is read from stdin.

-f --log-file=<logfile>

Specify the path to the input log file. If set in the config file, it will take priority over -f from the command line.

-S --log-size=<bytes>

Specify the log size in bytes. This is useful when piping in logs for processing in which the log size can be explicitly set.

-l --debug-file=<debugfile>

Send all debug messages to the specified file.

-p --config-file=<configfile>

Specify a custom configuration file to use. If set, it will take priority over the global configuration file (if any).

--invalid-requests=<filename>

Log invalid requests to the specified file.

--unknowns-log=<filename>

Log unknown browsers and OSs to the specified file.

--no-global-config

Do not load the global configuration file. This directory should normally be /usr/local/etc, unless specified with --sysconfdir=/dir. See --dcf option for finding the default configuration file.

PARSE OPTIONS

-a --agent-list

Enable a list of user-agents by host. For faster parsing, do not enable this flag.

-d --with-output-resolver

Enable IP resolver on HTML|JSON output.

-e --exclude-ip=<IP|IP-range>

Exclude an IPv4 or IPv6 from being counted. Ranges can be included as well using a dash in between the IPs (start-end).

Examples: exclude-ip 127.0.0.1 exclude-ip 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.100 exclude-ip ::1 exclude-ip 0:0:0:0:0:ffff:808:804-0:0:0:0:0:ffff:808:808

-H --http-protocol=<yes|no>

Set/unset HTTP request protocol. This will create a request key containing the request protocol + the actual request.

-M --http-method=<yes|no>

Set/unset HTTP request method. This will create a request key containing the request method + the actual request.

-o --output=<path/file.[json|csv|html]>

Write output to stdout given one of the following files and the corresponding extension for the output format:

/path/file.csv - Comma-separated values (CSV) /path/file.json - JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) /path/file.html - HTML

-q --no-query-string

Ignore request's query string. i.e., www.google.com/page.htm?query => www.google.com/page.htm.

Note: Removing the query string can greatly decrease memory consumption, especially on timestamped requests.

-r --no-term-resolver

Disable IP resolver on terminal output.

--444-as-404

Treat non-standard status code 444 as 404.

--4xx-to-unique-count

Add 4xx client errors to the unique visitors count.

--anonymize-ip

Anonymize the client IP address. The IP anonymization option sets the last octet of IPv4 user IP addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses to zeros. e.g., 192.168.20.100 => 192.168.20.0 e.g., 2a03:2880:2110:df07:face:b00c::1 => 2a03:2880:2110:df07::

--all-static-files

Include static files that contain a query string. e.g., /fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff?v=4.0.3

--browsers-file=<path>

By default GoAccess parses an "essential/basic" curated list of browsers & crawlers. If you need to add additional browsers, use this option. Include an additional delimited list of browsers/crawlers/feeds etc. See config/browsers.list for an example or https://raw.githubusercontent.com/allinurl/goaccess/master/config/browsers.list

--date-spec=<date|hr>

Set the date specificity to either date (default) or hr to display hours appended to the date.

This is used in the visitors panel. It's useful for tracking visitors at the hour level. For instance, an hour specificity would yield to display traffic as 18/Dec/2010:19

--double-decode

Decode double-encoded values. This includes, user-agent, request, and referrer.

--enable-panel=<PANEL>

Enable parsing and displaying the given panel.

Available panels: VISITORS REQUESTS REQUESTS_STATIC NOT_FOUND HOSTS OS BROWSERS VISIT_TIMES VIRTUAL_HOSTS REFERRERS REFERRING_SITES KEYPHRASES STATUS_CODES REMOTE_USER CACHE_STATUS GEO_LOCATION MIME_TYPE TLS_TYPE

--hide-referrer=<NEEDLE>

Hide a referrer but still count it. Wild cards are allowed in the needle. i.e., *.bing.com.

--hour-spec=<hr|min>

Set the time specificity to either hour (default) or min to display the tenth of an hour appended to the hour.

This is used in the time distribution panel. It's useful for tracking peaks of traffic on your server at specific times.

--ignore-crawlers

Ignore crawlers from being counted.

--ignore-panel=<PANEL>

Ignore parsing and displaying the given panel.

Available panels: VISITORS REQUESTS REQUESTS_STATIC NOT_FOUND HOSTS OS BROWSERS VISIT_TIMES VIRTUAL_HOSTS REFERRERS REFERRING_SITES KEYPHRASES STATUS_CODES REMOTE_USER CACHE_STATUS GEO_LOCATION MIME_TYPE TLS_TYPE

--ignore-referrer=<referrer>

Ignore referers from being counted. Wildcards allowed. e.g., *.domain.com ww?.domain.*

--ignore-statics=<req|panel>

Ignore static file requests.

req Only ignore request from valid requests

panels Ignore request from panels.

Note that it will count them towards the total number of requests

--ignore-status=<CODE>

Ignore parsing and displaying one or multiple status code(s). For multiple status codes, use this option multiple times.

--keep-last=<num_days>

Keep the last specified number of days in storage. This will recycle the storage tables. e.g., keep & show only the last 7 days.

--no-ip-validation

Disable client IP validation. Useful if IP addresses have been obfuscated before being logged. The log still needs to contain a placeholder for %h usually it's a resolved IP. e.g. ord37s19-in-f14.1e100.net.

--no-strict-status

Disable HTTP status code validation. Some servers would record this value only if a connection was established to the target and the target sent a response. Otherwise, it could be recorded as -.

--num-tests=<number>

Number of lines from the access log to test against the provided log/date/time format. By default, the parser is set to test 10 lines. If set to 0, the parser won't test any lines and will parse the whole access log. If a line matches the given log/date/time format before it reaches <number>, the parser will consider the log to be valid, otherwise GoAccess will return EXIT_FAILURE and display the relevant error messages.

--process-and-exit

Parse log and exit without outputting data. Useful if we are looking to only add new data to the on-disk database without outputting to a file or a terminal.

--real-os

Display real OS names. e.g, Windows XP, Snow Leopard.

--sort-panel=<PANEL,FIELD,ORDER>

Sort panel on initial load. Sort options are separated by comma. Options are in the form: PANEL,METRIC,ORDER

Available metrics: BY_HITS - Sort by hits BY_VISITORS - Sort by unique visitors BY_DATA - Sort by data BY_BW - Sort by bandwidth BY_AVGTS - Sort by average time served BY_CUMTS - Sort by cumulative time served BY_MAXTS - Sort by maximum time served BY_PROT - Sort by http protocol BY_MTHD - Sort by http method

Available orders: ASC DESC

--static-file=<extension>

Add static file extension. e.g.: .mp3 Extensions are case sensitive.

GEOLOCATION OPTIONS

-g --std-geoip

Standard GeoIP database for less memory usage.

--geoip-database=<geofile>

Specify path to GeoIP database file. i.e., GeoLiteCity.dat.

If using GeoIP2, you will need to download the GeoLite2 City or Country database from MaxMind.com and use the option --geoip-database to specify the database. You can also get updated database files for GeoIP legacy, you can find these as GeoLite Legacy Databases from MaxMind.com. IPv4 and IPv6 files are supported as well. For updated DB URLs, please see the default GoAccess configuration file.

Note: --geoip-city-data is an alias of --geoip-database.

OTHER OPTIONS

-h --help

The help.

-s --storage

Display current storage method. i.e., B+ Tree, Hash.

-V --version

Display version information and exit.

--dcf

Display the path of the default config file when `-p` is not used.

PERSISTENCE STORAGE OPTIONS

--persist

Persist parsed data into disk. If database files exist, files will be overwritten. This should be set to the first dataset. See examples below.

--restore

Load previously stored data from disk. If reading persisted data only, the database files need to exist. See --persist and examples below.

--db-path=<dir>

Path where the on-disk database files are stored. The default value is the /tmp directory.

DIFFERENT OUTPUTS

# goaccess access.log

To generate an HTML report:

# goaccess access.log -a -o report.html

To generate a JSON report:

# goaccess access.log -a -d -o report.json

To generate a CSV file:

# goaccess access.log --no-csv-summary -o report.csv

GoAccess also allows great flexibility for real-time filtering and parsing. For instance, to quickly diagnose issues by monitoring logs since goaccess was started:

# tail -f access.log | goaccess -

And even better, to filter while maintaining opened a pipe to preserve real-time analysis, we can make use of tail -f and a matching pattern tool such as grep, awk, sed, etc:

# tail -f access.log | grep -i --line-buffered 'firefox' | goaccess --log-format=COMBINED -

or to parse from the beginning of the file while maintaining the pipe opened and applying a filter

# tail -f -n +0 access.log | grep -i --line-buffered 'firefox' | goaccess --log-format=COMBINED -o report.html --real-time-html -

MULTIPLE LOG FILES

# goaccess access.log access.log.1

It's even possible to parse files from a pipe while reading regular files:

# cat access.log.2 | goaccess access.log access.log.1 -

Note that the single dash is appended to the command line to let GoAccess know that it should read from the pipe.

Now if we want to add more flexibility to GoAccess, we can do a series of pipes. For instance, if we would like to process all compressed log files access.log.*.gz in addition to the current log file, we can do:

# zcat access.log.*.gz | goaccess access.log -

Note: On Mac OS X, use gunzip -c instead of zcat.

REAL TIME HTML OUTPUT

The process of generating a real-time HTML report is very similar to the process of creating a static report. Only --real-time-html is needed to make it real-time.

# goaccess access.log -o /usr/share/nginx/html/site/report.html --real-time-html

By default, GoAccess will use the host name of the generated report. Optionally, you can specify the URL to which the client's browser will connect to. See https://goaccess.io/faq for a more detailed example.

# goaccess access.log -o report.html --real-time-html --ws-url=goaccess.io

By default, GoAccess listens on port 7890, to use a different port other than 7890, you can specify it as (make sure the port is opened):

# goaccess access.log -o report.html --real-time-html --port=9870

And to bind the WebSocket server to a different address other than 0.0.0.0, you can specify it as:

# goaccess access.log -o report.html --real-time-html --addr=127.0.0.1

Note: To output real time data over a TLS/SSL connection, you need to use --ssl-cert=<cert.crt> and --ssl-key=<priv.key>.

WORKING WITH DATES

The following will get all HTTP requests starting on 05/Dec/2010 until the end of the file.

# sed -n '/05Dec2010/,$ p' access.log | goaccess -a -

or using relative dates such as yesterdays or tomorrows day:

# sed -n '/'$(date '+%d%b%Y' -d '1 week ago')'/,$ p' access.log | goaccess -a -

If we want to parse only a certain time-frame from DATE a to DATE b, we can do:

# sed -n '/5Nov2010/,/5Dec2010/ p' access.log | goaccess -a -

If we want to preserve only certain amount of data and recycle storage, we can keep only a certain number of days. For instance to keep & show the last 5 days:

# goaccess access.log --keep-last=5

VIRTUAL HOSTS

vhost.com:80 10.131.40.139 - - [02/Mar/2016:08:14:04 -0600] "GET /shop/bag-p-20 HTTP/1.1" 200 6715 "-" "Apache (internal dummy connection)"

And you would like to append the virtual host to the request in order to see which virtual host the top urls belong to

awk '$8=$1$8' access.log | goaccess -a -

To exclude a list of virtual hosts you can do the following:

# grep -v "`cat exclude_vhost_list_file`" vhost_access.log | goaccess -

FILES & STATUS CODES

# awk '$7~/.html|.htm|.php/' access.log | goaccess -

Note, $7 is the request field for the common and combined log format, (without Virtual Host), if your log includes Virtual Host, then you probably want to use $8 instead. It's best to check which field you are shooting for, e.g.:

# tail -10 access.log | awk '{print $8}'

Or to parse a specific status code, e.g., 500 (Internal Server Error):

# awk '$9~/500/' access.log | goaccess -

SERVER

# nice -n 19 goaccess -f access.log -a

and if you don't want to install it on your server, you can still run it from your local machine:

# ssh -n root@server 'tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log' | goaccess -

Note: SSH requires -n so GoAccess can read from stdin. Also, make sure to use SSH keys for authentication as it won't work if a passphrase is required.

INCREMENTAL LOG PROCESSING

1

A dataset must be persisted first with --persist, then the same dataset can be loaded with

2

--restore. If new data is passed (piped or through a log file), it will append it to the original dataset.

NOTES

GoAccess keeps track of inodes of all the files processed (assuming files will stay on the same partition), in addition, it extracts a snippet of data from the log along with the last line parsed of each file and the timestamp of the last line parsed. e.g., inode:29627417|line:20012|ts:20171231235059

First it compares if the snippet matches the log being parsed, if it does, it assumes the log hasn't changed dramatically, e.g., hasn't been truncated. If the inode does not match the current file, it parses all lines. If the current file matches the inode, it then reads the remaining lines and updates the count of lines parsed and the timestamp. As an extra precaution, it won't parse log lines with a timestamp ≤ than the one stored.

Piped data works based off the timestamp of the last line read. For instance, it will parse and discard all incoming entries until it finds a timestamp >= than the one stored.

For instance:

// last month access log
# goaccess access.log.1 --persist

then, load it with

// append this month access log, and preserve new data
# goaccess access.log --restore --persist

To read persisted data only (without parsing new data)

# goaccess --restore