Setup log format

So you’re tired of reading apache with column -t or need to process them with external tools maybe push them into a logstash? Say no more:

#
# Inside your virtual host definition
#

# Declaring your custom log format as a JSON structure
LogFormat '{"time":"%{%FT%T%z}t","response":{"status":"%>s","duration":"%D","length":"%B"},"request":{"method":"%m","host":"%V","port":"%p","url":"%U","query":"%q"},"client":{"ip":"%a","agent":"%{User-agent}i","referer":"%{Referer}i"}}' json_log

# Declaring an environment variable based on the type of file requested
SetEnvIf Request_URI "(\.gif|\.png|\.jpg|\.ico|\.css|\.js|\.eot|\.ttf|\.woff2?)$" request_static=1

# Declaring separate log files (one for static content, one for dynamic pages) with the new log format
CustomLog /path/to/log/access_static.log  json_log env=request_static
CustomLog /path/to/log/access_dynamic.log json_log env=!request_static

Tool to read/analyse the logs (manually)

A small tool called jq which basically reads each line and treats it as a JSON object, then outputs them pretty printed.

The package itself doesn’t have any dependencies and is readily available in linux repos.

Minimal usage:

echo '{"a": 1, "b": 2, "c": 3, "d": [{"e": 4}]}' | jq .

{
  "a": 1,
  "b": 2,
  "c": 3,
  "d": [
    {
      "e": 4
    }
  ]
}

Object restructuring:

echo '{"a": 1, "b": 2, "c": 3, "d": [{"e": 4}]}' | jq '{"c": .a, "e": .d[0].e}'

{
  "c": 1,
  "e": 4
}

Parsing string content as JSON:

echo '{"a":1,"b":"[{\"c\":2,\"d\":\"3\"}, {\"c\":3,\"e\":\"5\"}]"}' | jq '.["b"]|fromjson'

[
  {
    "c": 2,
    "d": "3"
  },
  {
    "c": 3,
    "e": "5"
  }
]

Filtering:

echo '{"a":1,"b":"[{\"c\":2,\"d\":\"3\"}, {\"c\":3,\"e\":\"5\"}]"}' | jq '.["b"]|fromjson|.[]|select(.c == 2)'

{
  "c": 2,
  "d": "3"
}