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  4. Self-Hosting Your Own Analytics Server With Piwik
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    Self-Hosting Your Own Analytics Server With Piwik

    1. June 2015
    2. Daily
    3. gelezen 920

    Final product image
    What You'll Be Creating

    Piwik may be the most polished open source analytics tool you've never heard of. Not only has it had more than two million downloads, it has a rich set of features and excellent documentation. This tutorial will describe how to install and use it to track web traffic to your own sites.

    If you prefer to pay to have someone else run it for you, they offer several cloud-based options. Piwik offers a 30 day free trial with $65 monthly pricing afterwards. There's also a community of paid consultants you can hire to assist you.

    Benefits to Hosting Your Own Analytics

    I've been a long-time user of freemium, cloud-service analytics provider Statcounter. I like being able to see specific user activity and IP address traffic. While Google Analytics doesn't provide this information, Statcounter lacks many of the features that Google Analytics provides for free.

    Enter Piwik, a mature, well-documented, full-featured open source analytics product written in PHP; it even offers free mobile applications for iOS and Android. 

    Piwik Offers a Mobile App

    The team has upcoming plans to offer a tool to migrate Google Analytics data to Piwik in 2015.

    Installing Piwik on Your Own Server

    Piwik runs on any modern LAMP-based server configuration. If you'd like, you can begin with my generic Ubuntu LAMP installation here.

    Then, follow my installation instructions below and/or watch the installation video:

    First, let's download the open source Piwik code and create a web directory for your dashboard:

    mkdir /var/www/piwik
cd /var/www/piwik
sudo wget http://builds.piwik.org/piwik.zip
sudo unzip piwik.zip 
sudo rm piwik.zip
sudo rm How\ to\ install\ Piwik.html

    Change the ownership and permissions appropriate to your web server:


    chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/piwik
sudo mkdir /var/www/piwik/tmp
sudo mkdir /var/www/piwik/tmp/assets/
sudo mkdir /var/www/piwik/tmp/cache/
sudo mkdir /var/www/piwik/tmp/logs/
sudo mkdir /var/www/piwik/tmp/tcpdf/
sudo mkdir /var/www/piwik/tmp/templates_c/
sudo chmod  -R 0755 /var/www/piwik/tmp
sudo chmod  -R 0755 /var/www/piwik/tmp/assets/
sudo chmod  -R 0755 /var/www/piwik/tmp/cache/
sudo chmod  -R 0755 /var/www/piwik/tmp/logs/
sudo chmod  -R 0755 /var/www/piwik/tmp/tcpdf/
sudo chmod  -R 0755 /var/www/piwik/tmp/templates_c/

    Create an Apache site configuration file and paste the Virtual Host definition below into it. Then, enable the site.

    cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
sudo nano stats.conf
sudo a2ensite stats.conf

    Paste in and customize the virtual host definition for your Piwik site as shown below:

    <VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName piwik.yourdomain.com
   DocumentRoot /var/www/piwik 
   DirectoryIndex index.php
   <Directory /var/www/piwik/>
      AllowOverride All
      Order Deny,Allow
      Allow from all
   </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

    Setting Up Piwik

    You can follow the Piwik five minute installation guide if you'd like more details. The installation wizard you should see on your site is quite simple:

    Piwik Installation Wizard Welcome

    It performs a system check, which should pass if you followed my LAMP configuration guide:

    Piwik Installation Wizard System Check

    Enter in the database permissions that you created from the configuration guide—when you created your MySQL database:

    Piwik Installation Wizard MySQL Database Setup

    You should see this:

    Piwik Installation Wizard Database Created

    Specify your administrator or superuser login credentials:

    Piwik Installation Wizard Superuser

    Now, you can add your first website to track:

    Piwik Installation Wizard Add Your Site

    Keep in mind that the site isn't actively tracking yet. We'll do that below.

    If you log out, you'll be greeted with the Piwik sign-in. Enter your administrative credentials chosen above:

    Piwik Sign In

    Enabling Tracking From Your Sites

    There are a couple of ways to enable tracking on your website.

    Embedding JavaScript

    Just like with Google Analytics, you can paste the Piwik JavaScript into your website code:

    Piwik Tracking Code in Javascript

    WordPress Plugin

    Or, you can install the WP-Piwik plugin:

    WP-Piwik Plugin for WordPress

    Next, visit your Piwik API settings and copy your authentication token—just the parameter value (mine is blacked out below).

    Piwik API Key

    Visit the WordPress WP-Piwik Settings page and provide your Piwik URL, the domain you set up to host Piwik, and the auth token. 

    WP-Piwik Plugin for WordPress Settings

    Don't forget to visit the Tracking tab under settings to turn on the tracking code on your WordPress site:

    WP-Piwik Plugin for WordPress Tracking

    The Piwik Dashboard

    You should be able to see data coming in immediately from the real-time dashboard panel:

    Piwik Real Time Visitor Panel

    Once Piwik's been collecting data for a few days, you should see something like this in the Piwik Dashboard when you log in:

    Piwik Dashboard

    All the sites you've added can be viewed at a glance:

    Piwik All Sites

    Here's what a summary of traffic by page title looks like:

    Piwik Visitor Traffic by Page Title

    Here's a visitor log for all traffic:

    Piwik Visitor Log

    And Piwik has a variety of other features such as device, operating system and browser statistics:

    Piwik Devices and Operating Systems

    The Piwik administration settings are well designed and very thorough. It's unusually good for an open source project:

    Piwik Settings

    Piwik Mobile Applications

    There are also free Piwik mobile apps available at the AppStore and Google Play, so you can keep up with your site traffic on the go more easily:

    Piwik iOS and Android Mobile Apps

    Special Considerations

    Piwik has a wide variety of capabilities. Here are a few things you may wish to update in your own system.

    Anonymizing IP Addresses

    You can change how much of IP addresses Piwik collects—this affects the relative privacy of your users:

    Piwik Anonymize IP Addresses

    Excluding Your Visits

    You can set a cookie on your browser to prevent Piwik from adding traffic of your own editing and browsing from being counted:

    Piwik Exclude Your Visits

    Rolling Up Database Logs

    You can also set up Piwik to automatically roll up its logs and reports, to prevent the database from growing too large over time:

    Piwik Rollup Logs

    Where to Go From Here

    Hopefully you've found Piwik useful and interesting. The team has a variety of ways for you to learn more and engage with its community:

    I've been impressed with the clean design and relatively robust feature set provided by this free, open source project.

    If you have any questions or suggestions, please post them in the comments. If you'd like to keep up on my future Tuts+ tutorials and other series, please visit my instructor page or follow @reifman.

    Photo

    martijn broeders

    founder/ strategic creative bij shineyrock web design & consultancy
    e-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
    telefoon: 434 210 0245
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