W3Perl is a

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

logfile analyser, which can parse Web/FTP/Mail/CUPS/DHCP/SSH and Squid logfiles. Most major web logfile formats are supported (Web : CLF/ECLF/NECLF on Unix, IIS/

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

on Microsoft; Mail : Postfix/Sendmail/Exim), as well as split/compressed files. "Page tagging" and counter are also supported if you do not have logfiles access. The output is spread over HTML pages, with graphics and a sortable table. Stats can be run from a single command line or from a web browser.

Features

Essential features like hosts, pages, scripts, countries, filetype, traffic, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, referrer,

user agent On the Web, a user agent is a software agent responsible for retrieving and facilitating end-user interaction with Web content. This includes all web browsers, such as Google Chrome and Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland jour ...

, and error are available along with other specific W3Perl stats like real-time and session stats.

Administration

W3Perl has an administration interface which allows building configuration files from a web interface. One can also manage configuration files, package updates, run scripts, and see stats output.

Cross-platform availability

Written in

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

, W3Perl can be installed on any

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

that supports Perl. As such, it can be installed on Unix, Windows or Mac OS X. An installer is available for Windows and Mac OS X.

Licensing

W3Perl is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Security considerations

Running the scripts from the administration interface should be restricted with login/password. Blocking referrer spam have been added but as it is based on a blacklist, the file must be updated regularly. Real-time stats can only run once to prevent overloading the server.

Alternatives

There are other free tools: * Analog is written in C (and therefore very fast) but it lacks some features like session statistics. * AWStats has a large user base, is very powerful but still lacks some of the features of W3Perl. * Piwik is a set of scripts in PHP using a Mysql database.

References

External links

* {{Perl Web analytics Perl software Free software programmed in Perl Free web analytics software Web technology