9

It's surprising how difficult it is to find a simple, concise answer to this question:

  1. I have a file, foo.zip, on my website
  2. What can I do to find out how many people have accessed this file?
  3. I could use Tomcat calls if necessary
Eric Aya
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David Koelle
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4 Answers4

12

Or you could parse the log file if you don't need the data in realtime.

grep foo.zip /path/to/access.log | grep 200 | wc -l

In reply to comment:

The log file also contains bytes downloaded, but as someone else pointed out, this may not reflect the correct count if a user cancels the download on the client side.

Sean Bright
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  • does this tell you if the download was completed or cancelled? – Steven A. Lowe Oct 01 '08 at 16:03
  • -1. Please see the next answer.. its simpler than parsing a log – bobobobo Feb 11 '11 at 21:29
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    Simpler to write a script that increments a counter and then forwards the request to another file? Alrighty. – Sean Bright Feb 11 '11 at 22:09
  • I just spend some time trying to find out _if_ I have access to the logs, and _where_ I possibly could find them. A hint regarding default locations would be great. Otherwise one could easily spend as much time searching for the logs as it takes to write a script that increments a counter and... especially if it turns out that you don't have the logs like in my case :) – bluenote10 Jun 13 '15 at 19:23
10

The simplest way would probably be instead of linking directly to the file, link to a script which increments a counter and then forwards to the file in question.

Chris
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4

With the answer "The simplest way would probably be instead of linking directly to the file, link to a script which increments a counter and then forwards to the file in question."

This is additional:

$hit_count = @file_get_contents('count.txt');
$hit_count++;
@file_put_contents('count.txt', $hit_count);

header('Location: http://www.example.com/download/pics.zip'); // redirect to the real    file to be downloaded

Here count.txt is a simple plain text file, storing the counter info. You can save it in a database table along with downloadable_filename.ext also.

biegleux
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Ashraf Zaman
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0

Use the logs--each GET request for the file is another download (unless the visitor stopped the download partway through for some reason).

Max Cantor
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