[Docker] Statistics and reporting

[Bockiii]

Hi,

I wanted to open a discussion about access statistics and reporting of rssbridge.

The current docker image uses the official php image. The official images all softlink the access and error logs to STDOUT and STDERR.

See https://github.com/docker-library/php/blob/64811791f0682262478d73514819908fcfe73d7f/Dockerfile-apache-block-1.template#L34

In order to do any kind of reporting, those softlinks would need to be broken. We could then either map the folder to the host or just keep them living while the container is running (which would provide no history for the container other than the current run). The typical thing would be to create a volume called "rssbridgelogs" or so and map it to the log folder. This volume could then be used to create statistics by applications like AWStats and the like.

So, it may add some complexity (depending on how it's implemented) but might be very handy for some people, specially those running public instances.

[Bockiii]

Researching a bit more, I found out that this stdout stream is usable for reporting purposes as well, but it seems like none of the website access reporters can work with it. Supposedly because in docker land a php container is not supposed to log anything as the analysis would be done on the load balancer end of things.

[captn3m0]

What kind of reporting are you looking for? I think logging and analytics are different usecases and they should be tackled differently. If you are planning to analyze the logs (such as by GoAccess) it ought to work already.

If you are looking for metrics, that is much more difficult in php, and is better suited to something else.

[captn3m0]

There's also the option of using docker's logging driver configuration that will pipe your logs to wherever you want.

Using stdout is also friendlier to other non-docker container runtimes, such as using systemd-nspawn or podman to run rss-bridge as a service.

[Bockiii]

dang it.. discussions dont give the same notifications as issues/prs :/

My goal with this is to solve an issue that comes up ever so often: People asking if they can see which bridges are used (for public hosted instances for example). Having the php logs piped into goaccess/awstats or something like that would provide that functionality (and even focus on issues with people refreshing too often, generating too much traffic etc).

I think there are multiple possible options. From hacky to elegant.

Hacky:

• Mount a log folder, let rss-bridge log into that folder, mount the same folder in awstats/goaccess and refresh ever so often.

Upside: Relatively easy to do, nothing fancy needed.
Downside: Logs have a tendency to get bigger and bigger and without log rotation or some other kind of log management (which we dont have), it might create problems down the line (almost surely will :) ).

Stick-Shift-Solution:

• Try to pipe the stdout from the php container somehow to a statistics container. Not sure if or how that works (specially in docker-compose scenarios) but that was my initial hope.

Upside: No dealing with log rotations. The reporting solution itself will probably have something.
Downside: Totally unclear if that's even possible

Elegant:

• Change the log driver to fluentd/gelf, spin up a logstash container, do the analysis from there

Upside: Use industry default applications with lots of documentation and great features
Downside: relatively resource hungry and a lot of moving parts to manage in order to just see stats on rss bridge.

[em92]

Inviting @captn3m0 as docker expert to this thread.