There is a tool for that: GoAccess. It’s an easy to use command line tool to analyze any access log and create beautiful insights.

Installation

On macOS you can use HomeBrew to install GoAccess:

brew install goaccess

For other operation systems, please check out the detailed documentation on their website.

Usage

The most elegant way is the terminal output. For this, simply type:

 goaccess access.log --log-format=COMBINED

Which creates such an output (you can navigate down to see much more details):

You can also create an html file that you can view in your browser:

goaccess access.last.log -o report.last.html --log-format=COMBINED

And voilà:

If your terminal is not using the same language as your log files do, then you might need to set LC_TIME for a correct parsing of the log files:

LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" goaccess access.last.log -o report.last.html --log-format=COMBINED

To learn more about all options, you can check out the documentation of GoAccess.

Photo by Aryan Dhiman on Unsplash.