Self hosted webstats using goatcounter

Created: Apr 26, 2023 by Pradeep Gowda Updated: Nov 04, 2023 Tagged: self-hosting · webstats

I would like to understand how, and who is reading this website and its many pages; mostly to satisfy my own curiosity. But, I do not like to use Google Analytics or similar “free” services because I myself block trackers like that¹. A self hosted webstats service keeps the stats on the same server² as the page the visitor accessed in the first place³.

I have used goatcounter previously, but I used their hosted service. I stopped using them when I felt paying for webstats wasn’t something I cared for.

Recently I discovered that the source code behind the service is open-source - https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter, and I thank Martin Tournoij for open sourcing it. I hope to support the project via github sponsorship sometime.

Goatcounter checks many boxes for the software I want to run myself:

• easy installation (a single binary)
• small memory footprint (written using golang)
• uses sqlite for data storage
• well documented online and in the console (with -h option)
• easy discoverability of features.

So, I went ahead and installed it on my server and configured it to serve the tracker as well as dashboard from https://gc.btbytes.com.

I automated the installation using Ansible. I proxied the instance behind my existing nginx webserver. I had to rerun certbot⁴ to add new letsencrypt provided SSL certificates for the gc.btbytes.com domain.

The actual command to run the server, as configured in the systemd file is as follows:

/usr/local/bin/goatcounter serve -automigrate -listen :5860 \
-tls none -db sqlite+/data/web/gc.btbytes.com/db/goatcounter.sqlite3

• The automigrate is a nice option that applies migrations on server start - I think this will come in handy when I upgrade the server version and expect the db migrations to be applied automatically
• setting tls to none allows me to use the nginx SSL termination
• the db flag points to the sqlite db location.

Tracking visits to each page is easy as adding the following line to the sitebuild script:

<script data-goatcounter="https://gc.btbytes.com/count"
 async src="//gc.btbytes.com/count.js"></script>