Understanding Apache's access log

Question

What do each of the things in this line from my access log mean?

127.0.0.1 - - [05/Feb/2012:17:11:55 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 140 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.5 Safari/535.19"

Answer 1

I also don't under stand what the "-" means after the 200 140 section of the log

That value corresponds to the referer as described by Joachim. If you see a dash though, that means that there was no referer value to begin with (eg. the user went straight to a specific destination, like if he/she typed a URL in their browser)

Answer 2

And what does "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.5 Safari/535.19" means ?

This is the value of User-Agent, the browser identification string.

For this reason, most Web browsers use a User-Agent string value as follows:

Mozilla/[version] ([system and browser information]) [platform] ([platform details]) [extensions]. For example, Safari on the iPad has used the following:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7B405 The components of this string are as follows:

Mozilla/5.0: Previously used to indicate compatibility with the Mozilla rendering engine. (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us): Details of the system in which the browser is running. AppleWebKit/531.21.10: The platform the browser uses. (KHTML, like Gecko): Browser platform details. Mobile/7B405: This is used by the browser to indicate specific enhancements that are available directly in the browser or through third parties. An example of this is Microsoft Live Meeting which registers an extension so that the Live Meeting service knows if the software is already installed, which means it can provide a streamlined experience to joining meetings.

This value will be used to identify what browser is being used by end user.

Refer

Answer 3

You seem to be using the combined log format.

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\"" combined

• %h is the remote host (ie the client IP)
• %l is the identity of the user determined by identd (not usually used since not reliable)
• %u is the user name determined by HTTP authentication
• %t is the time the request was received.
• %r is the request line from the client. ("GET / HTTP/1.0")
• %>s is the status code sent from the server to the client (200, 404 etc.)
• %b is the size of the response to the client (in bytes)
• Referer is the Referer header of the HTTP request (containing the URL of the page from which this request was initiated) if any is present, and "-" otherwise.
• User-agent is the browser identification string.

The complete(?) list of formatters can be found here. The same section of the documentation also lists other common log formats; readers whose logs don't look quite like this one may find the pattern their Apache configuration is using listed there.