Concatenate Apache Logs

Read all apache logs and create a new file with only lines matching a given regex pattern

Description

The objective of this Powershell script is to scan a given folder, get the list of Apache log files from there and process all files, one by one.

Run a regular expression on the file content so any lines matching a given search string (like part of an URL f.i.) will be outputted in a result file.

At the end, you'll get a resulting file where all matches lines will be there.

Example

Imagine you've create a few APIs and all APIs are accessible by using an URL where the word api is part of the URL. For instance: .*\/api\/.* (search for all lines where the pattern /api/ appears).

Running this Powershell script with .*\/api\/.* will thus extract any calls to an API URL to the result file.

Use

1. Download all your Apache log file into a folder like in c:\logs\;
2. Copy the concat.ps1 script from this repository in that folder;
3. With an editor, edit concat.ps1 and update the value of two variables in the initialize function
   1. $global:outFile: choose the name of your result file; you can of course keep the current one;
   2. $global:searchRegex: make sure to type here a valid regex (if you're not familiar with regular expressions, use the https://regex101.com/ website, very nice.)
4. From the DOS prompt, go to the c:\logs\ folder and run the Powershell .\concat.ps1 command. The script will start and you'll get your result file once all Apache log files have been processed.

Note: once the result file has been created, Apache log files are probably no longer useful. You can ask to the script to delete log files once processed. There is a constant called KILL_LOG at the top of the script. Just type $TRUE if you want to delete logs and $FALSE if you want to keep them.