How to Run Go Access behind Nginx Proxy

This is tutorial on how to run Go Access (a Visual Web Log Analyzer) behind an NGINX web server on Ubuntu 18.04.

Get Sudo Privilege

Before start we make sure that we will have no permission issue on the installation & configuration.

sudo su

NGINX Install & Config

Install Nginx from package manager

apt-get update
apt-get install nginx

after that, create a virtual host on the Nginx configuration

nano /etc/nginx/site-available/goaccess

copy & Paste this config:

map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade {
    default upgrade;
    '' close;
}

upstream gwsocket {
    server 127.0.0.1:7890;
}

server {
    listen 8080;

    # replace with your actual domain
    server_name your.domain.com;
    
    # if you chose a different location for the webroot, use it here
    root /var/www/html;
	
    location / {
        try_files $uri =404;
    }

    location /ws {
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
        proxy_pass http://gwsocket;
        proxy_buffering off;
        proxy_read_timeout 7d;
    }
}

note that this is a config for http, if you use https please look nginx guide to use ssl. And don’t forget yo change your.domain.com to your actual domain.

Create symbolic links from /sites-available to /sites-enable

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/goaccess /etc/nginx/sites-enable/

Check if there is some error in your configuration

nginx -t

If there is no error, then you can reload the nginx

service nginx reload

Go Access Install & Config

Install Go Access from the package manager

apt-get update
apt-get install goaccess

To configure the goaccess, first open the goaccess configuration file

nano /etc/goaccess.conf

From here, it is up to you to config the goaccess, but this is enough if you want to visualize nginx access log. You can uncomment these part:

time-format %H:%M:%S
date-format %d/%b/%Y
log-format COMBINED
daemonize true
real-time-html true
ws-url ws://your.domain.com:8080/ws
keep-db-files true 
load-from-disk true

Don’t forget to change your.domain.com to your actual domain. exit and save.

After configure the config file, you can run goaccess by running this command to create a live report in /var/www/html/live-report.html by refering to nginx access.log file.

goaccess /var/log/nginx/access.log -a -o /var/www/html/live-report.html

Wait a couple of minutes until there is live-report.html in /var/www/html/

Accessing Go Access Live Report

Now, Your live report should be generated and can be accessed in http://your.domain.com:8080/live-report.html