AWStats Replacement - Which alternative should HestiaCP adopt?

Community Support Web
1

Hi everyone,

I’m really hoping the AWStats replacement makes it into the next stable release. Since AWStats is no longer actively maintained by its original developers, it makes sense for HestiaCP to transition to a more modern, secure and efficient log analyzer. However, there are a few great options out there and I’m curious to see where the community stands regarding server resources and UI preferences.

I’ve set up a quick poll below. Which alternative would you prefer to see integrated into HestiaCP as the default?

  • GoAccess (Lightweight & Fast)
  • Matomo (Full-featured Analytics)
  • Keep AWStats (Legacy/Don’t fix what isn’t broken)
  • Other (Please specify in the comments!)
0 voters

Vote in the poll and let me know your reasoning in the comments! If you have another alternative in mind, please drop it below.

Cheers!

2

You can also check this AWstats fork version: GitHub - hestiacn/vstats: vstats: The Modernized Legacy of AWStats. A high-performance, UTF8-native refactor of the legendary AWStats (1995-2026). Reviving a classic after its 2025 deprecation. · GitHub

3

Also goaccess is a single executable, so real easy to install.

4

How do you install goaccess? I tried but domain.com/vstats/ gives this error message.

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5

It depends what you’re trying to do with it!
First of all edit the config file /etc/goaccess/goaccess.conf
And set log format, date format, time format. (You can also set these on the command line). These worked for me:

date-format %d/%b/%Y
time-format %H:%M:%S
log-format %h %^[%d:%t %^] "%r" %s %b "%R" "%u"

If you want a live report of the current log, which it looks like you’re trying to do, then this sort of thing works.
goaccess /var/log/apache2/domains/domain.com.log -o /home/user/web/domain.com/public_html/report.html --real-time-html
And then load domain.com/report.html in your browser.

If you want to create daily, weekly, monthly reports on a schedule, then you’ll have to dust off your programming chops and design queries to pull the date ranges you want out of the logs, and process them into a static html report file. (Hint, ChatGPT and friends can help) Then run it as a cron job.

The domain you publish can be anywhere you want on the same server, so you might want to set up a stats.domain.com with a password protection on it to stop prying eyes.

6

I have tested GoAccess and I was very pleased with it. Found it easy to install and configure.