Configuring Apache Servers

The following is a very basic description on how to set up log files on Apache servers.

We recommend you to use the Combined log format because the Common log format doesn't contain information about referrers and user agents (OS, browsers, spiders). By default Apache uses the Common log format but the majority of hosting providers set the Combined log format for Apache on their servers.

Log format can be configured by editing the "httpd.conf" file in the \Apache\conf\ directory. The configuration settings for the log file should look like the following:

The following directive defines the "combined" nickname
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined
# The location and format of the access log file
CustomLog logs/access.log combined