Fabien Chevalier has developed The WebDruid, a software for generating statistics reports for web sites. The WebDruid is based on Bradford L. Barret's The Webalizer. Beside some nice new features like User Flow charts, multi-language support during runtime and better search engine support it comes already with support for the W3C log file format which is used by Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). This makes The WebDruid interesting for Windows Web Servers.

How can I use it on Windows?

The WebDruid is a software intended for Unix systems but it can be compiled on Windows with help of Cygwin, which is a Unix environment for Windows. For just using The WebDruid you don't need Cygwin. Just download and install the precompiled package I'm offering here:

webdruid-0.5.4-win32-1.exe (2.9 MB)

This file is a Setup created with Jordan Russel's Inno Setup. If you are interested in the Setup configuration, here it is: setup.iss (5.2 KB). I have also created two simple graphics for the installer: wizardimage.bmp (151 KB) and wizardimagesmall.bmp (9.1 KB).

To get rid of the typical directory hierarchy of unix I have modifed the sources a little bit so all webdruid related stuff is searched in the directory where the webdruid.exe is installed. Here is the patch which isn't more than a quick ugly hack: webdruid-0.5.4-win32.diff (3.8 KB)

It's installed. And now?

After installing the package you have all files of The WebDruid in a directory like C:\Progam Files\WebDruid\. You'll also find a Start Menu folder which contains links to the documentation, to the Website and an Uninstall link. After that you are on your own. I don't provide any support for using The WebDruid. Read the documentation. If you are familiar with The WebDruid on Unix you may know what to do. To generate a report for a single Website it may be enough to just edit the configuration file (webdruid.conf) and starting the webdruid.exe every night or so. But for more complex installations you may want to create a script which calls The WebDruid for all the Websites on your server and for deleting old log files and stuff like that. If you are a Windows guru you may know how to do that with any of Microsoft's scripting languages. I don't know any of them. But if you are a Unix guru you may want to do it with Shell scripts and Cygwin or (if you don't want to use Cygwin) you can use the great scripting language Python, which is natively available for Windows, too.

Creating reports in specific languages

Webdruid can easily create reports in other languages than english. But while on Linux it is enough just to set the LC_ALL environment variable to the desired language on windows this is not enough. Setting only LC_ALL will bring you the correct language but you will run into problems if this language has special characters like german umlauts or french accentuated characters. The solution is to set the variable OUTPUT_CHARSET to UTF-8. So you may use a batch file like this to run webdruid:

@echo off
set LC_ALL=de_DE
set OUTPUT_CHARSET=UTF-8
webdruid.exe

Please note that this is not a webdruid issue. It's cygwin related.