Real-time JSON export

[igorhrcek]

Hi!

Would it be possible to obtain a real-time JSON export? I am using a Prometheus for monitoring and I would like to pull JSON, that GoAccess already makes, convert it into Prometheus metrics and store within it to use for alerting and Grafana charts.

Now, there is option to export data into JSON format, and I've seen an example linked in Readme that provides JSON output, but I am unsure how to get it on my instance. I am currently running GoAccess like this:

goaccess access.log --log-format=COMBINED --real-time-html -o /var/www/userdata/web/public/public_html/report.html

Thank you!

[allinurl]

Great question! A few options come to mind: you could try reading from the named pipe under /tmp, though I’m not entirely sure if that would work. An easier method might be to use something like websocat to read directly from the WebSocket, for example, with websocat ws://your_goaccess_server:7890. You might even be able to do it with curl. It’s also possible to handle this with JavaScript if needed.

For a more direct approach, we’d need to tweak the real-time HTML output format and possibly add something like --real-time-json. However, I'm not sure where the output should be directed.

[igorhrcek]

Having --real-time-json would be great even if it is redirected to a file. Alternatively, maybe you could register URL endpoints that would provide JSON/HTML/CSV output without a need to write to a file on disk?