[plug] Making a PHP application's Apache logs meaningful

[Matthew Lambie]

'Afternoon all,

Here's my dilema; I'm sure someone can point me towards a solution.

We have a client that has a web site. They run it on our server, and we 
use AWStats to parse the Apache logs and give them pretty pictures to 
look at. The logic behind the site is quite simple, an index.php takes a 
variable of "c" in the form of "index.php?c=21" which translates to 
"retrieve content page 21 from the database and display it in the 
content area".

Each content page has a title, so page 21 might be "Magical Lifesaving 
Product Extreme". When they look at their AWStats all they see is a hit 
to index.php, and there's no reference to "c=21" (which is meaningless 
anyways).

The number of hits to index.php (and hence the site) is irellevent. What 
matters is that they need to look at their stats and see a hit to 
"Magical Lifesaving Product Extreme". My first thought was to modify 
their index.php handler to write a fake entry into their Apache log 
file, so it would show a hit to "magical_lifesaving_product_extreme.php" 
but it doesn't appear that I have write-access to the log files without 
messing with their permissions, and then there's the headache of 
breaking logrotate... and so on. That seems dead end.

The only guaranteed way I can think is to write a log to the database, 
and have a cron job read the database and write the fake entries to 
their log file. I'd rather avoid this.

Using a 404 handler with Apache's mod_rewrite might be an angle, but I 
know nothing about this... which I why I'm putting the call out.

All of their "internal links" reference "index.php?c=21" so I can't 
break that, but I could follow the thought process of "if c is an 
integer, then look up the title of that page and request the browser to 
request the title (magical_lifesaving_product_extreme.php)" which is 
handled with mod_rewrite... maybe?

Sorry for the manuscript!

-- 

Thanks,

Matthew Lambie
Technical Director

THE FRONTIER GROUP, PTY. LTD.
Suite 17/44 Kings Park Road
West Perth, WA  6005
Australia

w: http://thefrontiergroup.com.au
e: mlambie at thefrontiergroup.com.au
f: +61 (08) 6263 4444
m: +61 408 866 997