I set this up back in July when my site was hosted with H-Insiders and I didn’t have direct access to my Apache logs. I figured that I could do this myself with a few basic PHP functions, and by doing so I was able to set up my own access log in a static text file that I could download whenever I wanted. This first example is to log unique visitors to your site as well as gather some important information about them. Here is the code:


<?php
session_start();
if(!session_is_registered('counted')){
$agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$user = $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'];
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$dtime = date('r');

if($ref == ""){
$ref = "None";
}
if($user == ""){
$user = "None";
}

$entry_line = "$dtime - IP: $ip | Agent: $agent | URL: $uri | Referrer: $ref | Username: $user n";
$fp = fopen("access_log.txt", "a");
fputs($fp, $entry_line);
fclose($fp);
session_register('counted');
}
?>

Basically, this is what the code it doing:

session_start();

First, we have to create a session so that the script will only log this visitor’s activity until the session expires

if(!session_is_registered('counted')){

This snippet checks to see if there is a session variable anywhere, and there is it executes the next section of code.

$agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$user = $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'];
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$dtime = date('r');

This is where the information is collected:

HTTP_USER_AGENT logs the browser type of the visitor

REQUEST_URI logs the page request

PHP_AUTH_USER shows the login credentials used if a user is being authenticated

REMOTE_ADDR shows the IP address of the visitor

HTTP_REFERER shows where the visitor was referred from

Now, to write to the logfile we see this code:

$entry_line = "$dtime - IP: $ip | Agent: $agent | URL: $uri | Referrer: $ref | Username: $user n";
$fp = fopen("access_log.txt", "a");
fputs($fp, $entry_line);
fclose($fp);
session_register('counted');

You’ll see that the first line is simply printing out the variables defined above as labels, which can be modifed to whatever you want. fopen and fclose are simple php commands used to open and close a file, while fputs will write the variable $entry_line to the file, with $entry_line being equal to all the information collected by the script. The name of the file we are writing to is “access_log.txt” and the path in the script should reflect the location of where you want that file to be on your server.

But what if you want to bypass sessions and log every single page hit? First of all, your log file is going to become massive, but if you would like to keep more extensive logs all you have to do is exclude this code from the script:

session_start();
if(!session_is_registered('counted')){

session_register('counted');
}
?>

Now you have set up a simple logging system to keep your own Apache access logs. Just make sure you set the text file location to where you want the script to write on your webserver, preferrabled somewhere outside your document root folder.

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