Easy Privacy-Friendly Self-Hosted Website Analytics with GoatCounter

Per goatcounter.com, “it aims to offer easy to use and meaningful privacy-friendly web analytics as an alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo.” I chose it because I wanted something that didn’t require a GPDR notice and was easy to deploy and simple to use. My initial search for self-hosted web analytics tools led me to Plausible and Matomo. Either would have worked, but I’m hosting on a small VPS and wanted to keep things lightweight so installing docker for Plausible or PHP for Matomo were not ideal for my use case. I know the language a tool is written in shouldn’t be the most important factor when choosing a tool, but I’ve had good luck with tools written in Go or Rust hitting the sweet spot for simplicity, features, and ease of deployment. So I searched google for “golang web analytics” and GoatCounter came up near the top.

GoatCounter checked my boxes for feature set, simplicity, and ease of deployment. It can be deployed with a single binary file and a systemd service unit file, but I also connected it to an existing Postgresql database that I use for Commento already to get a little (unnecessary) performance boost without much extra complexity over the default SQLite deployment.

All of this is being performed on a virtual private server running Debian 11 (Bullseye) hosted by Linode. Replace danmc.net with your domain as appropriate.

Setup User and Database

First setup a new user to run the service:

sudo adduser goatcounter

This creates a new system user and group and creates a home directory /home/goatcounter/.

Next, create a new database and user:

sudo -i -u postgres # this gets you into a command prompt as the postgres superuser
createuser --interactive --pwprompt goatcounter  # this creates the new postgres user
# enter a password for the user and answer "n" for no to all of the questions.
createdb --owner goatcounter goatcounter  # this creates a new db owned by goatcounter
exit  # exit the postgres user login session

Install GoatCounter

Start a login session as user goatcounter:

sudo -i -u goatcounter
cd /home/goatcounter/
wget https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/releases/download/v2.2.3/goatcounter-dev-linux-amd64.gz
# replace above with latest from https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/releases
gzip -d goatcounter*
chmod +x goatcounter*  # make it executable
ln -s goatcounter* goatcounter-latest  # for easy updates without changing service file
./goatcounter-latest db create site -vhost stats.danmc.net -user.email YOUR_EMAIL -db "postgresql+user=goatcounter host=/run/postgresql dbname=goatcounter sslmode=disable"
# replace YOUR_EMAIL as appropriate. Enter a password that will be used along with your email to login.
exit  # exit the goatcounter login session

Setup systemd Service

Create a systemd service unit file to run goatcounter:

cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/goatcounter.service
[Unit]
Description=goatcounter daemon service
After=network.target postgresql.service

[Service]
Type=simple
User=goatcounter
Group=goatcounter
ExecStart=/home/goatcounter/goatcounter-latest serve -listen localhost:8081 -tls http -db "postgresql+user=goatcounter host=/run/postgresql dbname=goatcounter sslmode=disable"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

A few things to note:

• It makes sure postgresql service is running first (After=…).
• We are running as the goatcounter user not as root (User=…, Group=…).
• No database password is necessary because by default, in Debian 11 at least, the Postgresql pg_hba.conf file is setup to use “peer” authentication for local access which allows it to “Obtain the client’s operating system user name from the operating system and check if it matches the requested database user name.”
• It uses “-listen localhost:8081 -tls http” arguments because NGINX will handle TLS termination and reverse proxy all connections. By default, goatcounter serves on ports 80 and 443 and uses LetsEncrypt to automatically get a TLS cert. That won’t work though since we already have NGINX listening on these ports.

Now start the service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload  # tells systemd to check for new unit files
sudo systemctl enable goatcounter.service  # make it run on boot
sudo systemctl start goatcounter.service  # start it now
sudo systemctl status goatcounter.service  # check for errors

The service should now be running on http://localhost:8081.

NGINX and LetsEncrypt Setup

I won’t go thru a detailed NGINX setup in this post but briefly:

sudo apt install nginx-extras certbot python3-certbot-nginx
# nginx can probably be used instead of nginx-extras if you want
cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/nginx/sites-available/danmc.net
server {
    server_name www.danmc.net;
    return 301 https://danmc.net$request_uri;
}
server {
    server_name danmc.net;
    location / {
            root /srv/www/danmc.net/public;
            index index.html;
    }
}
EOF
sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/danmc.net /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo nginx -t  # to check that config is fine
sudo systemctl reload nginx
# make sure your server firewall allows tcp ports 80 and 443
# make sure your DNS setup points both @ and www to your server
sudo certbot --nginx -d danmc.net -d www.danmc.net

Add a stub server section to your enabled NGINX config:

cat << EOF | sudo tee -a /etc/nginx/sites-available/danmc.net
server {
    server_name stats.danmc.net;
    location / {
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8081;
    }
    location /loader {
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8081;

            proxy_http_version 1.1;
            proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
            proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
            proxy_read_timeout 86400;
    } 
}
EOF

Note the “location /loader {…}” section. It is required to allow the websocket connection for the dashboard to be properly proxied.

In your DNS config (usually through the website of whoever you purchased your domain name from, e.g., namecheap.com), add an A record to point the stats sub-domain to your server. Wait an appropriate amount of time for the DNS to propagate (5-30 minutes is normally enough), then:

sudo certbot --nginx -d stats.danmc.net

That should install a new cert and auto-update and reload your nginx config.

Finishing Touches

Go to https://stats.danmc.net and login to GoatCounter with the email and password specified above. The dashboard will show the <script> tag to add to the template for all of your website pages. I added it to the bottom of my footer snippet; this ensures the script is loaded on every page.

After redeploying your site, try visiting a page on your site, then come back and refresh the dashboard. You should see the page hits registered.

I also went into settings and there is a setting for “Ignore IPs”. I added my home IP to this so my visits do not get tracked. A few other settings:

• Your Site: danmc.net
• Language: initially unchecked, I checked it because “why not”
• Region: initially was restricted to only tracking for US, RU, and CH, but I clear it to track for all.
• Delete pageviews: I deleted my initial test pageviews to clear everything.

Thats it. Happy tracking!