Purpose

You have Apache and Nginx-format log files, for private sites without Google Analytics. You'd like to know what the most popular URLs have been lately. You don't want to install a complex log analysis package. You just want a quick report, right now.

Install

npm install -g poptop

Usage

tail -50000 /var/log/nginx/mysite.access.log | poptop

Out comes a list of URLs sorted by popularity.

That list includes pages not found and other errors. Want to kick those out?

tail -50000 /var/log/nginx/mysite.access.log --successful | poptop

Want to focus on the "404 not found" errors?

tail -50000 /var/log/nginx/mysite.access.log --notfound | poptop

Reading the results in terminal? Want the most popular URLs at the bottom? No problem:

tail -50000 /var/log/nginx/mysite.access.log | poptop -r

That's great, but you don't care about static assets like .gif, .png, etc. OK, let's ignore them:

tail -50000 /var/log/nginx/mysite.access.log | poptop --ignore-static

Query strings are showing up as separate accesses. Let's clobber those:

tail -50000 /var/log/nginx/mysite.access.log | poptop --ignore-query

How about totals for folders?

tail -50000 /var/log/nginx/mysite.access.log | poptop --ignore-static --folders

Don't want to count 302 and 304 redirects themselves as successful?

tail -50000 /var/log/nginx/mysite.access.log | poptop --ignore-redirects

Here's a really fancy command line from my actual life:

tail -100000 mysite.access.log | poptop --ignore-static --ignore-query --successful --ignore-redirects "--ignore=/admin|svn|/logout|/login" --folders

Search report

After popular pages, the second most common question is "what did people search for?" Use the --search option to find out:

tail -50000 /var/log/nginx/mysite.access.log | poptop --search=/search,q

You'll need to specify the URL where searches happen, and the query string parameter that contains the search string, separated by a comma.

(If your search engine uses POST requests, the search string won't be in the logs, so I can't help you there.)

Other options

You can also ignore individual file extensions with --ignore-extensions. For convenience, --ignore-static is equivalent to --ignore-extensions=gif,jpg,png,js,xlx,pptx,docx,css,ico,pdf.

And, you can ignore any regular expression you wish with the --ignore option. Be sure to quote it to avoid shell issues.

Credits

poptop was created to facilitate our work at P'unk Avenue.

Changelog

0.1.4: added --ignore-redirects and a report of total accesses.

0.1.3: added woff and eot to --ignore-static.

0.1.2: the --ignore-extensions option works properly. Also, extensions are still ignored if they are followed by a query string.