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I'm trying to make a CGI script (for nginx) that outputs an html page containing the usage statistics for my server. I'm using goaccess 0.7.1 and CentOS 5 x86.

I've configured nginx to run my bash script (stats.sh) for requests on port 8080.

The bash script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

cat /var/log/nginx/mydomain.access.log | goaccess -a > stats.html

echo Content-Type: text/html
echo Content-Length: $(stat -c%s stats.html)
echo
cat stats.html

When I run ./stats.sh, everything works fine. It prints a bunch of html code in the console window, and if I open stats.html, I see a bunch of html code.

THE PROBLEM IS, when I try to access http://www.mydomain.com:8080/, I just get a blank page. Now when I open stats.html on the server, it's completely empty.

I've confirmed the following permissions:

  • stats.sh: -rwxr-xr-x
  • stats.html: -rw-rw-rw-
  • goaccess: -rwxr-xr-x

I also know that CGI is working properly because if I modify stats.sh to only output the contents of stats.html (without writing to the file), it works fine when I hit http://www.mydomain.com:8080/; it just sends whatever data was in stats.html from before. So something is going wrong with calling goaccess in a CGI script. Does anyone know why?

UPDATE

I also tried this:

echo "<!DOCTYPE hmtl><html><body>TEST</body></html>" > stats.html

and it works fine when I hit http://www.mydomain.com:8080/, so something is going wrong when running goaccess from FastCGI.

I also tried specifying the full path to goaccess (/usr/local/bin/goaccess):

/var/log/nginx/mydomain.access.log | /usr/local/bin/goaccess -a >stats.html 2>stats.err

but this also did not work.

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  • Sounds like permissions issue, did you check your /var/log/nginx/nginx_error.log? Commented Aug 8, 2014 at 3:04
  • It doesn't show anything from my :8080 request. The last entry is: 014/08/07 20:05:51 [error] 24993#0: *610 access forbidden by rule, client: x.x.x.x, server: _, request: "GET /manager/html HTTP/1.1", host: "x.x.x.x:8080". I don't have a page called /manager/html, nor did I ever request it, so I assume this is from a crawler. All of the errors from the last 2 days are similar to this one. Commented Aug 8, 2014 at 3:45
  • I tried your script on Apache (CGI), first it wasn't writing anything to stats.html (blank page), I did chmod a+rwx /usr/lib/cgi-bin and it worked fine. I'll see if I can fire up an nginx instance and test it. Commented Aug 8, 2014 at 3:55
  • 1
    Perhaps writing the goaccess stderr log to a file can help clear things up: goaccess -a >stats.html 2>stats.err Commented Aug 8, 2014 at 6:51
  • I tried adding the 2>stats.err part, but it doesn't generate the stats.err file at all when I run it from FastCGI. If I run the bash script manually, it generates stats.err as an empty file. Commented Aug 26, 2014 at 2:19

1 Answer 1

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mydomainI finally got it to work! The main problem was my .goaccessrc file. I had foolishly created this file in /root, so obviously non-root users could not read it. I moved it to /etc and it works fine now. Here is the final code for my bash file:

#!/bin/bash

cat /var/log/nginx/mydomain.access.log | /usr/local/bin/goaccess -a -p /etc/.goaccessrc >stats.html 2>stats.err

echo Content-Type: text/html
echo Content-Length: $(stat -c%s stats.html)
echo
cat stats.html

Make sure to run chmod 666 stats.err.

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