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Dennis Pallett is a young tech writer, with much experience in ASP, PHP and other web technologies. He enjoys writing, and has written several articles and tutorials. To find more of his work, look at his websites at http://www.phpit.net, http://www.aspit.net and http://www.webdev-articles.com
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Getting the information
The most important part is getting the information from your visitor. Thankfully, this is extremely easy to do in PHP (or any other scripting language for that matter). PHP has a special global variable called $_SERVER which contains several environment variables, including information about your visitor. To get all the information you want, simply use the following code:
PHP Code:
// Getting the information
$ipaddress = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$page = "http://{$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']}{$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']}";
$page .= iif(!empty($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']), "?{$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']}", "");
$referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$datetime = mktime();
$useragent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$remotehost = @getHostByAddr($ipaddress);
Note: I used a function in the above example called iif(). You can get this function at http://www.phpit.net/code/iif-function.
Logging the information
Now that you have all the information you need, it must be written to a log file so you can later look at it, and create useful graphs and charts. To do this you need a few simple PHP function, like fopen and fwrite.
The below code will first create a complete line out of all the information. Then it will open the log file in "Append" mode, and if it doesn't exist yet, create it.
If no errors have occurred, it will write the new logline to the log file, at the bottom, and finally close the log file again.
PHP Code:
// Create log line
$logline = $ipaddress . '|' . $referrer . '|' . $datetime . '|' . $useragent . '|' . $remotehost . '|' . $page . "\n";
// Write to log file:
$logfile = '/some/path/to/your/logfile.txt';
// Open the log file in "Append" mode
if (!$handle = fopen($logfile, 'a+')) {
die("Failed to open log file");
}
// Write $logline to our logfile.
if (fwrite($handle, $logline) === FALSE) {
die("Failed to write to log file");
}
fclose($handle);
PHP Code:
include ('log.php');
After a while you'll probably want to view your log file. You can easily do so by simply using a standard text editor (like Notepad on Windows) to open the log file, but this is far from desired, because it's in a hard-to-read format.
Let's use PHP to generate useful overviews for is. The first thing that needs to be done is get the contents from the log file in a variable, like so:
PHP Code:
// Open log file
$logfile = "/some/path/to/your/logfile.txt";
if (file_exists($logfile)) {
$handle = fopen($logfile, "r");
$log = fread($handle, filesize($logfile));
fclose($handle);
} else {
die ("The log file doesn't exist!");
}
PHP Code:
// Seperate each logline
$log = explode("\n", trim($log));
PHP Code:
// Seperate each part in each logline
for ($i = 0; $i < count($log); $i++) {
$log[$i] = trim($log[$i]);
$log[$i] = explode('|', $log[$i]);
}
The first thing that is very easy to do is getting the number of pageviews. Simply use count() on the $log array, and there you have it;
PHP Code:
echo count($log) . " people have visited this website.";
PHP Code:
// Show a table of the logfile
echo '<table>';
echo '<th>IP Address</th>';
echo '<th>Referrer</th>';
echo '<th>Date</th>';
echo '<th>Useragent</th>';
echo '<th>Remote Host</th>';
foreach ($log as $logline) {
echo '<tr>';
echo '<td>' . $logline['0'] . '</td>';
echo '<td>' . urldecode($logline['1']) . '</td>';
echo '<td>' . date('d/m/Y', $logline['2']) . '</td>';
echo '<td>' . $logline['3'] . '</td>';
echo '<td>' . $logline['4'] . '</td>';
echo '</tr>';
}
echo '</table>';
In Conclusion...
In this article I have shown you have to create a logging module for your own PHP website, using nothing more than PHP and its built-in functions. To view the log file you need to parse it using PHP, and then display it in whatever way you like. It is up to you to create a kick-*** traffic analyzer.
If you still prefer to use a pre-built traffic analyzer, have a look at http://www.hotscripts.com.
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