Foray into analytics

So far, all the websites I hosted never had any sort of analytics at all - Never.
I think it is high time to change just that.
This small little guide will leverage goaccess to generate static reports that can easily be served via any webserver (In this guide, we will use Nginx).

Prepare the directories

First things first - creating the necessary directories.
This is easily done as follows.

$ sudo mkdir /var/www/html/metrics
$ sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/html/metrics/

One script to rule them all

I’ve decided to write a small little script that will be called from Cron so that I do not have to bother running the command by hand.

$ sudo vim /usr/local/bin/webreport

#!/bin/bash

zcat -f /var/log/nginx/access.log* | \
sudo -u service docker run --rm -v /srv/geoip/db.mmdb:/db.mmdb:ro -i -e LANG=$LANG allinurl/goaccess -a -o html --geoip-database=/db.mmdb --log-format COMBINED - \
> /var/www/html/metrics/report.html

chown www-data:www-data /var/www/html/metrics/report.html

Now, make the script is executable:

$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/webreport

That’s it for the script part.

Short explanation: The script starts a goaccess container and generates the report. It also leverages GeoIP lookups which are explained below (The needed setup for that). For now, you can save the script as is.

GeoIP shenanigans

We need to grab a suitable GeoIP database to make country lookups possible. Luckily this is very easy given the fact that the Docker goaccess image has GeoIP support bultin (Well, the binary has support baked in).

$ wget 'https://github.com/P3TERX/GeoLite.mmdb/raw/download/GeoLite2-Country.mmdb'

Next make a dedicated directory and move the database over

$ sudo mkdir /srv/geoip
$ sudo mv GeoLite2-Country.mmdb /srv/geoip/db.mmdb

Disclaimer: Where you put the database does not matter. However keep in mind that the script expects the db to be found under /srv/geoip - make the changes needed to suit it to your needs!

Cron to the rescue

After all of the above tasks are done we need to configure a cronjob to generate the report without interaction periodically.

First, edit /etc/crontab

$ sudo vim /etc/crontab

Insert the following line:

30 * * * * root /usr/local/bin/webreport

Explanation: This will tell cron to run our script webreport every 30 minutes
(You can of course change this if needed - depending on what you want/need)

Save your changes and continue to the Nginx setup.

Webserver time

You could just add the directory to your webserver of choice and be done with it.
But if you are anything like me, the fact of having those statistics out in the open is not really thrilling.
A simple solution is to use HTTP authentication since it is very easy to set up and imho enough to keep prying eyes away.
So, let’s just do exactly that!

First, install the apache2-utils.

$ sudo apt install apache2-utils -y

Next, generate the desired user and set a password.

$ sudo htpasswd -c /etc/nginx/.htpasswd $USERNAME

Note: Replace $USERNAME with your desired user name.

Enter the password twice and we are done with that step.

Now we configure Nginx to acutally use HTTP authentication on the subdiretory we created in the beginning.

Open the configuration file of your website.
(This varies wildly depending on how you named it and how you did configure nginx!)

Add the following lines to your vhost configuration for your site

location /metrics {
    auth_basic "Restricted Content";
    auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd;

    index report.html;
}

Explanation: This tells Nginx that you serve the subfolder /metrics with HTTP authentication.
Also, the index file was set to the created report from goaccess - which is named report.html in the script.

Reload Nginx to apply the changes.

$ sudo systemctl reload nginx

Analytics all the way!

The only thing left to do is to navigate to the report you just created!
Use your browser of choice here - I’ll use Firefox here.

$ firefox https://website.com/metrics

Note: Before anything will be displayed the cronjob has to be run before to actually generate the report! - Keep that in mind!

Done. You now have the power to gain more insight into your website.

Final words

goaccess really makes gathering analytics easy and painless. Given the fact that you can just run a quick Docker oneliner and be done is for sure comfy.

You might want to have a look at the options goaccess provides to further improve your setup. Or you might want to alter the script…

No matter what: You can do so according to your own needs.

Last but not least…

Stay Open!