automatic dedicated access_log for each client using ip in naming

Question

We have an internal app and I want to have the apache httpd server create new log files based on each of the client ips. In the documentation I see you can have multiple logs.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/logs.html

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common CustomLog logs/access_log common CustomLog logs/referer_log "%{Referer}i -> %U" CustomLog logs/agent_log "%{User-agent}i" 

but what I really want is something like this.

CustomLog logs/%h-access_log common 

where the %h is extrapolated into the ip address i.e. 1.1.1.1-access_log

I imagine there's a mod_perl way to do this but just wondering if anyone knows a way to do something like this through standard configuration before I write a module.

Answer 1

Use the Apache log pipe feature: logs can be sent to an outside process. That process will have full latitude to filter things as it wants and create files as needed. See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/logs.html#piped

You will just need to write the small script that parse the log input to extract the IP address and forward the line to the appropriate file.

Otherwise if you sort of control the amount of clients, you could define all needed files beforehand, and then using conditional logging, through specific variables, see this example at the same URL:

# Mark requests from the loop-back interface SetEnvIf Remote_Addr "127\.0\.0\.1" dontlog # Mark requests for the robots.txt file SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/robots\.txt$" dontlog # Log what remains CustomLog logs/access_log common env=!dontlog 

But even with your latest comment, I still think postprocessing is a better route. YMMV.