Python Cookbook

Calculating Apache Hits per IP Address

Credit: Mark Nenadov

Problem

You need to examine a log file from Apache to know the number of hits recorded from each individual IP address that accessed it.

Solution

Many of the chores of administering a web server have to do with analyzing Apache logs, which Python makes easy:

def CalculateApacheIpHits(logfile_pathname):
    # Make a dictionary to store IP addresses and their hit counts
    # and read the contents of the log file line by line
    IpHitListing = {}
    Contents = open(logfile_pathname, "r").xreadlines(  )
    # You can use .readlines in old Python, but if the log is huge...

    # Go through each line of the logfile
    for line in Contents:
        # Split the string to isolate the IP address
        Ip = line.split(" ")[0]

        # Ensure length of the IP address is proper (see discussion)
        if 6 < len(Ip) <= 15:
            # Increase by 1 if IP exists; else set hit count = 1
            IpHitListing[Ip] = IpHitListing.get(Ip, 0) + 1

    return IpHitListing

Discussion

This recipe shows a function that returns a dictionary containing the hit counts for each individual IP address that has accessed your Apache web server, as recorded in an Apache log file. For example, a typical use would be:

HitsDictionary = CalculateApacheIpHits("/usr/local/nusphere/apache/logs/access_log")
print HitsDictionary["127.0.0.1"]

This function is quite useful for many things. For example, I often use it in my code to determine the number of hits that are actually originating from locations other than my local host. This function is ...