analytics

analytics

a simple page hit counter

What it is

analytics is a simple self-hosted web server which allows simple anonymous analytics for your website. This is an alternative to other analytics tools which collect much more information on page views. analytics does not collect IP address, browser brand, etc. It only collects:

• URL of the hit
• timestamp of the hit

However, stored data strips the time from the timestamp so that hits are stored only by date.

analytics provides a simple view of the data available from the web interface.

Usage

Backend

go get gitlab.com/tbhartman/analytics

(A compiler is needed due to dependency on sqlite3, and, thus, the get will take some time.)

Run analytics new <path_to_config> to generate a configuration file at path_to_config. Example is:

# timezone in which to display analytics times
# strings passed to golang's time.LoadLocation
timezone: UTC

# a secret key for viewing analytics data
frontendkey: 9da0fbd5-8992-43a6-8f62-cdb23736df7f

# path to sqlite3 database file (will be created if not exists)
databasepath: testdb.sqlite3

# host on which to serve
serve:
  host: analytics.example.com
  port: 443

# page url hosts from which to accept hits
# if the Origin header does not match, the hit is rejected
# used as CORS response
hosts:
  - www.example.com
  - another.example.com

tlspublicpath: path_to_fullchain.pem
tlsprivatepath: path_to_privkey.pem

Run analytics <path_to_config> to start the server.

Frontend

To process a page view, POST to /hit on your analytics server, such as:

var hit = JSON.stringify(
    {
        "url": document.URL
    });
var xhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhttp.open("POST", "https://yourserver.example.com/hit", true);
xhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/json");
xhttp.send(hit);

To view current data, turn your browser to <host>/<key>/list, for example (if using the above config):

https://analytics.example.com/9da0fbd5-8992-43a6-8f62-cdb23736df7f/list

Which currently shows something like:

  Uptime              : 1d2h3m4s                  
  Current time        : 2021-01-01 00:00 MST  
  Last hit            : 2020-12-31 23:00 MST  
  Session server hits :                    2  
  Session page hits   :                    1  
  Total page hits     :                    3  


+-------------------+-----------+
|       PAGE        | HIT COUNT |
+-------------------+-----------+
| www.example.com/  |         2 |
+-------------------+-----------+
| www.example.com/a |         1 |
+-------------------+-----------+