Nginx Proxy Manager and GoAccess

Nginx proxy Manager (NPM) is a simple-to-use management interface for the Nginx reverse proxy. It handles the Let’s Encrypt certificates with ease.

GoAccess is a very effective Nginx log file analyser - in real time. Wouldn’t it be great to get them working together?

GoAccess just needs to be familiar with the format of the log file, and it will produce very pretty real time output of your stats. The problem was getting the log format correct. That was until I came across this script: https://github.com/stockrt/nginx2goaccess

You take the format of the log file output as used in the NPM nginx.conf and pass it to the script. It returns all you need to put into the goaccess.conf to inform it of your log format.

$ ./nginx2goaccess.sh '[$time_local] $upstream_cache_status $upstream_status $status - $request_method $scheme $host "$request_uri" [Client $remote_addr] [Length $body_bytes_sent] [Gzip $gzip_ratio] [Sent-to $server] "$http_user_agent" "$http_referer"'

- Generated goaccess config:

time-format %T
date-format %d/%b/%Y
log_format [%d:%t %^] %^ %^ %s - %m %^ %v "%U" [Client %h] [Length %b] [Gzip %^] [Sent-to %^] "%u" "%R"

I paste in the command output and restart goaccess and I get wonderful statistics.

Serving via Stats NPM

For extra credit I decided I wanted to serve my stats through NPM. For this I had to get creative. I have a website being served already. What I need to do is add two custom locations to my NPM site.

/stats - this needs to point at a simple web service hosting the report output HTML file.

/ws - this is used to point at the goaccess web sockets port on 7890.

For the /stats I wanted small and light - I used this https://lipanski.com/posts/smallest-docker-image-static-website It’s ready to pull down as a docker file and turn into a compose like this:

docker-compose.yml

version: '3.7'

services:
  web:
    image: lipanski/docker-static-website
    volumes:
      - "${PWD}/static:/home/static:ro"
    ports:
      - 3000:3000

Create an empty config file in static with:

touch static/httpd.conf

I then set the output of goaccess to put the file into the folder as static/index.hml. Set the scheme, hostname and port in the NPM custom location for /stat to http, 192.168.0.123/, 3009. Notice the trailing / on the hostname, it’s important.

For the /ws I did a similar location using scheme, hostname and port to http, 192.168.0.123/, 7890.

In my goaccess.conf I have:

ws-url wss://sub.domain.tld:443/ws

This is written into the index.html file output and allows the static file to dynamically update by calling a web socket.

Nginx Proxy Manager and GoAccess

Serving via Stats NPM

docker-compose.yml

References