Best way to count file downloads on a website

Question

It's surprising how difficult it is to find a simple, concise answer to this question:

1. I have a file, foo.zip, on my website
2. What can I do to find out how many people have accessed this file?
3. I could use Tomcat calls if necessary

Update: If you suggest writing a script, can you point me to a decent one?

Answer 1

The simplest way would probably be instead of linking directly to the file, link to a script which increments a counter and then forwards to the file in question.

Answer 2

Use the logs--each GET request for the file is another download (unless the visitor stopped the download partway through for some reason).

Answer 3

Or you could parse the log file if you don't need the data in realtime.

cat /path/to/access.log | grep foo.zip | grep 200 | wc -l

In reply to comment:

The log file also contains bytes downloaded, but as someone else pointed out, this may not reflect the correct count if a user cancels the download on the client side.

Answer 4

the download of a file is done on the client side in a separate thread, which the user can cancel, so there does not appear to be a reliable way to count 'full' downloads, only download attempts