Rhit reads your nginx log files in their standard location(even gzipped), does some analysis and tells you about it in pretty tables in your console, storing and polluting nothing.

It lets you filter hits by dates, status, referers or paths, and does trend analysis.

And it's fast enough (about one second per million lines) so you can iteratively try queries to build your insight.

Here I'm especially looking at dates and trends on hits with status 2xx and 3xx, on a given period:

Installation

Rhit is only tested on linux but is expected to work on Mac.

From source

You need the Rust toolchain. Do

cargo install rhit

From binaries

You may download linux binaries from https://dystroy.org/rhit/download.

Basic Usage

If rhit is on the server, and the logs are at their usual location:

rhit

(you may have to prefix with sudo to read the files in /var/log)

Tell rhit what files to open:

rhit ~/trav/nginx-logs

Filtering

Filter on paths

Filtering can be quite simple:

rhit -p download

But the syntax allows for much more interesting queries.

You may use a regular expression.

For example when I want to see all downloads of broot:

rhit -p '^/download/.*broot(.exe)?$'

You may negate expressions with a !.

For example, I have many paths which are just a number (eg /12345) and If I want to filter them, I can do

rhit -p '!^/\d+$'

(remember to use simple quotes and not double quotes to not have your shell interpret the expression)

Separating filters with a comma is an easy way to do a "AND".

If I want to get paths which are neither broot nor just a number, I'll do

rhit -p '!^/\d+$,!broot'

If I want to get all paths containing a digit, but not just a number, and not broot, I do

rhit -p '!^/\d+$,!broot,\d'

For a more complex logic, switch to binary expressions with parentheses and logic operators &, | and !.

For example to get all paths containing dystroy or blog but not broot:

rhit -p '( dystroy | blog ) & !broot'

(add spaces inside parenthesis to avoid them being understood as part of a regular expression)

To get all paths containing dystroy but neither blog, nor space nor any 4 digits numbers:

rhit -p 'dystroy & !( \d{4} | space | blog )'

Filter on referer

rhit -r reddit

As for the path, you may use a complex expression.

Only show a specific day

rhit -d 12/25

This shows only Christmas hits, assuming all the hits are from the same year. If the log contains several years, you need to precise it, eg rhit -d 2020/12/25. Symmetrically, you may omit the month if it's not ambiguous: rhit -d 25.

Only show a period:

rhit -d 2020/12/25-2021/01/03
rhit -d 2020/12
rhit -d 2020
rhit -d '>2020/12/25'
rhit -d '!2020/12/25'
rhit -d '<12/25'

Filter by status

The syntax is quite versatile:

rhit -s 404
rhit -s 5xx
rhit -s 3xx,410-421
rhit -s 301-305
rhit -s '!404'
rhit -s '4xx,!404'

Filter by remote IP address

rhit -i 123.123.123.123
rhit -i !123.123.123.123

Combine filters

You can use several arguments.

For example, to get all paths resulting in a 404 but not the robots.txt (which are legit queries) or the /crashy path:

Choose what to show

Fields

The displayed fields can be chosen with the -f argument.

Default fields: date,status,ref,path

Available fields: date,method,status,ip,ref,path

For example to only show remote IP adresses, statuses, and referers:

rhit -f ip,status,ref

Detail Level

Table lengths is decided with the -l argument.

Use rhit -l 0 to have just a few lines in the various tables, and rhit -l 5 for huge tables. Default value is 1.

Path filtering

By default the paths tables don't show "resources" like images, CSS, JS. If you don't want this filtering, use the --all argument:

rhit -a

Key

The measure used for sorting, histograms, and trends is either hits (default) or bytes (bytes in the response).

It's highlighted in pink in the report.

You set it with the --key argument:

Changes

Use the --changes (short: -c) argument so that Rhit shows you the paths, referers or remote addresses which are notably more popular or less popular.

Settings related to displayed fields and filtered values still apply.