Download the latest version (currently 6.5) from the Awstats website or head to the project page on Sourceforge. I'll assume that you have downloaded the tar.gz in ~/tmp on your Textdrive account. Substitute username with your own username where applicable.

Extract the files:

$ pwd
/users/home/username/tmp/awstats-6.5
$ tar -zxf awstats-6.5.tar.gz

Move the executable scripts to cgi-bin:

$ cd awstats-6.5
$ mv wwwroot/cgi-bin ~/cgi-bin/awstats

Move the rest of the files to your web root:

$ mv wwwroot ~/web/public/awstats

Create directory to store awstats data:

$ mkdir -p ~/homes/awstats-data

Copy over the model configuration file:

$ cd ~/cgi-bin/awstats
$ cp awstats.model.conf awstats.yourdomain.com.conf

Modify the newly copied configuration file using your favorite text editor:

• Set LogFile = ”/users/home/username/logs/access_log”
• Set LogFormat = 1
• Set SiteDomain = yourdomain.com
• Set DirData = ”/home/username/homes/awstats-data”
• Set DirCgi = ”/cgi-bin/awstats”
• Set DirIcons = ”/awstats/icon”
• Set StyleSheet = ”/awstats/css/awstats_default.css”

Test that it works:

$ cd ~/cgi-bin/awstats
$ ./awstats.pl -update -config=yourdomain.com

You should see awstats spew some output saying how many records were processed etc. Unless you see some error, you're good to go.

The main rules here are:

• Don't run your cron job more than once a day
• Don't run the awstats update script on more than one log file at a time

Your access logs are rotated on a daily basis at around midnight. So I have my cron job to simply scan the log file 5-10 min before midnight. That way, I process only one logfile at a time, and I (hopefully) don't miss too much data (with this setup, awstats won't log hits that you get during that 5-10 min window).

Here's how to do it:

• Log into webmin
• Goto “Scheduled Cron Jobs”
• Click on “Create a new scheduled cron job”
• For “Command”, enter /users/home/username/cgi-bin/awstats/awstats.pl -update -config=yourdomain.com
• Leave “Input to command” empty
• For description, enter “awstats” or some such
• Select “Times and dates below” for “when to execute”
• leave “Days”, “Months” and “weekdays” at “All”
• For “Minutes”, choose “selected” and click on one of 45/50/55
• For “Hours”, choose “selected” and click on 23
• Click on create

Thats it! You should be all set now. Try to check out your stats at http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/awstats/awstats.pl?config=yourdomain.com

You might want to secure your setup so that only you can view your stats. I just followed the instructions in this Textdrive KnowledgeBase article and it worked perfectly fine for me. Just create the .htaccess file in ~/cgi-bin/awstats

If you are setting up Awstats for the first time, you might be having a lot of old log file lying around in ~/logs that Awstats hasn't looked at yet. Ideally what you would like is to feed Awstats all the old log files so that you can look at your stats since back then. Here's a simple shell script to do this – basically it feeds the log files one at a time to Awstats, in chronological order. Be sure to use liberal sleep values so that the process limiting mechanisms in place don't kill it:

for log in $(ls -rt ~/logs/access*.gz)
do
    echo $log
    echo "zcat"
    zcat $log > ~/tmp/access_log
    sleep 30
    echo "awstats.pl"
    ./awstats.pl -update -config=yourdomain.com -LogFile=/users/home/username/tmp/access_log
    sleep 30
done