Sometimes Apache 2’s logs can get really polluted by entries which
you don’t care about and might skew your statistics. For example you
wouldn’t want your own IP address in the logs because you don’t want
that counted in the statistic. Although most web analyzers have filters
to exclude such things, you can do this directly in Apache by not
logging these. To do this you first need to set and environment variable
that matches what you don’t want to log - this can use regular
expressions and the matching is done on HTTP header fields like
Remote_Addr or Request_URI.
Let’s say you want to exclude all internal IPs in your company from your website’s logs. You need to add this to your httpd.conf or domain_name.conf, depending on how you have your web server set up:
For more details: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_log_config.html
Let’s say you want to exclude all internal IPs in your company from your website’s logs. You need to add this to your httpd.conf or domain_name.conf, depending on how you have your web server set up:
SetEnvIf Remote_Addr "10\.*\.*\.*" nologging
This just created a new variable in Apache’s environment called
“nologging”. Now we will add this to the log directive in the same
config file:CustomLog log/access.log combined env=!nologging
Now Apache will log everything except what is matched with the rule
above. If you want to add more things to the list of non-logging, we can
just continue adding rules to that variable. Let’s assume we decided
not to add the favicon.ico requests to the log:SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/favicon\.ico$" nologging
That’s it, no more pesky favicon requests in the logs! As you can
see, the rules are pretty powerful and there are many uses for this!
Also, don’t forget that you need the “log_config” and the “setenvif”
module loaded in Apache! As usual you can check this using httpd -M or
apache2 -M on the command line.For more details: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_log_config.html