## Index → Modules → Loggers

### Logger: NCSA

Also known as the Common log format (CLF). This is a standard format produced by many web servers and read by many log analysis tools. Some of the fields specified by the format might actually be missing if the information that should be logged is not present. These fields will simply be replaced by "hyphens" ("-"), which is the standard behavior.

This log format contains only basic HTTP access information: the requested resource and a few other pieces of information, but does not contain referral, user agent, or cookie information.

The fields in the Common log file format are:

     host rfc1413 username date:time request statuscode bytes

A log file produced by this logger will look more or less like this:

::ffff:127.0.0.1 - - [11/Aug/2008:16:17:58 +0000] "GET /index.html HTTP/1.1" 200 2633

Each field of this log entry is described below.

host (::ffff:127.0.0.1) :: This is the remote host's IP (the client IP) or host/subdomain. It corresponds to the address of the device requesting the information. If a proxy sever exists between the user and the server, this address will correspond to the proxy instead of the machine actually requesting data.

rfc1413 (-) :: Missing piece of information. In this case it is the RFC 1413 identity of the client determined by identd on the clients machine, which is highly unreliable and should not be trusted anyway.

user (-) :: This is the username or UID of the person requesting the document as determined by HTTP authentication. Since the document is not password protected, it is not present in this case. If it is present, the value should not be trusted until the user is actually authenticated.

date:time timezone ([11/Aug/2008:14:18:14 +0000]) :: The time when the server processed the request. The format is:

[day/month/year:hour:minute:second zone]

`- day = 2*digit - month = 3*letter - year = 4*digit - hour = 2*digit - minute = 2*digit - second = 2*digit - zone = (`` |` -) 4*digit

request"GET /index.html HTTP/1.1" :: The request from the client is given in double quotes, and contains the method used by the client (GET), the requested resource (/index.html) and the protocol (HTTP/1.1).

200 :: Status code sent back to the client. In this case it indicates a successful response. The full list of possible status codes can be found in the HTTP specification (RFC2616, section 10).

2633 :: The last entry is the size returned to the client excluding the response headers. This will be "-" if no content is returned. To log "0" for no content, use %B instead.