When your web site is static (generated upfront or cached in varnish/nginx), you cannot update view/hits/download counters on each request. This click tracking needs to be done with additional requests.
Let's say our download urls look like this:
http://example.org/download-file/craur/craur-1.2.0.zip
We add a new location to our nginx file:
location ~ ^/download-file/[^/]+/([^/]+)$ {
access_log /home/example/log/example.org.downloads.log short;
alias /home/dracoblue/files/$1;
}
The short access_log format is custom and needs to be defined in the nginx.conf:
log_format short '[$time_local] $status $request_uri';
If you make this, the log file at `` will look like this:
[07/Dec/2013:11:56:09 +0100] 200 /download-file/craur/craur-1.2.0.zip
[07/Dec/2013:12:02:51 +0100] 200 /download-file/naith/naith-0.1.0.zip
[07/Dec/2013:12:02:59 +0100] 200 /download-file/craur/craur-1.2.0.zip
Now we build a bash command line, to get the total amounts of all downloads in this timeframe:
cat example.org.downloads.log \
| grep "200 " \
| cut -f '4-' -d '/' \
| sort | uniq -c
- cat example.org.downloads.log reads the file.
- grep "200 " outputs only 200 reponses.
- cut -f '4-' -d '/' removes everything except /download-file/ ... .zip
- sort | uniq -c sorts everything and afterwards counts it with uniq.
The final output looks like this:
55 download-file/craur/craur-1.2.0.zip
2 download-file/naith/naith-0.1.0.zip
The is very easy to parse with your favorite programming language. Then you write the "hits" for those files into the database and you are done.
Updated: 2014/01/05 added Charles recommendation for log import:
When importing the file, it's important that you send a USR1 signal to the nginx process, to ensure that the nginx process re-opens the log files after the move:
mv /home/example/log/example.org.downloads.log /home/example/log/example.org.downloads.log.0
kill -USR1 `cat /var/run/nginx.pid`
This will allow nginx to continue writing in the file.
If your site makes lots of traffic, you might execute this cron job more often.
