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Why does the monthly, daily, hourly option in AWStats not work as expected?

Posted by Sebastian Marsching on

I recently encountered a strange problem in AWStats: In the time-range selector, there is a drop-down field selecting a mode (monthly, daily, or hourly), but when selecting anything except monthly, AWStats would tell me that the statistics had never been updated. This obviously was wrong, because the monthly view worked. So, why did this happen?

The answer is that this field controls the sparsely documented “database break” option of AWStats. This option controls on which level the database files, which are used for the stattistics, are generated. For monthly, one file is generated for each month of each year. For daily, one file is generated for each day of each month, and for hourly, one file is generated for each hour of each day.

However, the CGI (user interface) script does not generate these files, it simply expects them to be present. To generate these files, the correct value for the -DatabaseBreak option needs to be specified when calling AWStats to update the statistics from the log file.

So, if one really wants to use all three modes (monthly, daily, hourly), awstats.pl -update has to be called three times:

awstats.pl -update -DatabaseBreak=month
awstats.pl -update -DatabaseBreak=day
awstats.pl -update -DatabaseBreak=hour

The first line represents the default value for the database break option, so you could use awstats.pl -update instead.

However, be aware that this will create a lot of files, in particular for the hourly option. That’s why I chose to only use monthly statistics and simply remove the selection option from the HTML of the user interface (in order to avoid user confusion). In fact, according to the AWStats change log, this option was only added to the user interface in version 7.8. If you want to remove it, find the following lines in the awstats.pl script and remove them:

			print "<select class=\"aws_formfield\" name=\"databasebreak\">\n";
			print "<option"
			  . ( $DatabaseBreak eq "month" ? " selected=\"selected\"" : "" )
			  . " value=\"month\">Monthly</option>\n";
			print "<option"
			  . ( $DatabaseBreak eq "day" ? " selected=\"selected\"" : "" )
			  . " value=\"day\">Daily</option>\n";
			print "<option"
			  . ( $DatabaseBreak eq "hour" ? " selected=\"selected\"" : "" )
			  . " value=\"hour\">Hourly</option>\n";
			print "</select>\n";

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