Using GoAccess with Nginx to replace Google Analytics

post, Jan 25, 2021 on Mitja Felicijan's blog

Introduction

I know! You cannot simply replace Google Analytics with parsing access logs and -displaying a couple of charts. But to be honest, I actually never used Google -Analytics to the fullest extent and was usually interested in seeing page hits -and which pages were visited most often.

I recently moved my blog from Firebase to a VPS and also decided to remove -Google Analytics tracking code from the site since its quite malicious and -tracks users across other pages also and is creating a profile of a user, and -I've had it. But I also need some insight of what is happening on a server and -which content is being read the most etc.

I have looked at many existing solutions like:

But the more I looked at them the more I noticed that I am replacing one evil -with another one. Don't get me wrong. Some of these solutions are absolutely -fantastic but would require installation of databases and something like PHP or -Node. And I was not ready to put those things on my fresh server. Also having -Docker installed is out of the question.

Opting for log parsing

So, I defaulted to parsing already existing logs and generating HTML reports -from this data.

I found this amazing software GoAccess which provides -all the functionalities I need, and it's a single binary. Written in Go.

GoAccess can be used in two different modes.

GoAccess Terminal

Running in a terminal

GoAccess HTML

Running in a browser

I, however, need this to run in a browser. So, the second option is the way to -go. The Idea is to periodically run cronjob and export this report into a folder -that gets then server by Nginx behind a Basic authentication.

Getting Nginx ready

I choose Ubuntu on DigitalOcean. First I -installed Nginx, and -Letsencrypt certbot and all the -necessary dependencies.

# log in as root user
-sudo su -
-
-# first let's update the system
-apt update && apt upgrade -y
-
-# let's install
-apt install nginx certbot python3-certbot-nginx apache2-utils
-

After all this is installed we can create a new configuration for a statistics. -Stats will be available at stats.domain.com.

# creates directory where html will be hosted
-mkdir -p /var/www/html/stats.domain.com
-
-cp /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-available/stats.domain.com
-nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/stats.domain.com
-
server {
-  root /var/www/html/stats.domain.com;
-  server_name stats.domain.com;
-
-  index index.html;
-  location / {
-    try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
-  }
-}
-

Now we check if the configuration is ok. We can do this with nginx -t. If all -is ok, we can restart Nginx with service nginx restart.

After all that you should add A record for this domain that points to IP of a -droplet.

Before enabling SSL you should test if DNS records have propagated with curl stats.domain.com.

Now, it's time to provision TLS certificate. To achieve this, you execute -command certbot --nginx. Follow the wizard and when you are asked about -redirection always choose 2 (always redirect to HTTPS).

When this is done you can visit https://stats.domain.com and you should get 404 -not found error which is correct.

Getting GoAccess ready

If you are using Debian like system GoAccess should be available in repository. -Otherwise refer to the official website.

apt install goaccess
-

To enable Geo location we also need one additiona thing.

cd /var/www/html/stats.stats.com
-wget https://github.com/P3TERX/GeoLite.mmdb/raw/download/GeoLite2-City.mmdb
-

Now we create a shell script that will be executed every 10 minutes.

nano /var/www/html/stats.domain.com/generate-stats.sh
-

Contents of this file should look like this.

#!/bin/sh
-
-zcat -f /var/log/nginx/access.log* > /var/log/nginx/access-all.log
-
-goaccess \
-  --log-file=/var/log/nginx/access-all.log \
-  --log-format=COMBINED \
-  --exclude-ip=0.0.0.0 \
-  --geoip-database=/var/www/html/stats.domain.com/GeoLite2-City.mmdb \
-  --ignore-crawlers \
-  --real-os \
-  --output=/var/www/html/stats.domain.com/index.html
-
-rm /var/log/nginx/access-all.log
-

Because after a while nginx creates multiple files with access logs we use -zcat to extract Gziped contents and create -a file that has all the access logs. After this file is used we delete it.

If you want to exclude your home IP's result look at the --exclude-ip option -in script and instead of 0.0.0.0 add your own home IP address. You can find -your home IP by executing curl ifconfig.me from your local machine and NOT -from the droplet.

Test the script by executing sh /var/www/html/stats.domain.com/generate-stats.sh and then checking -https://stats.domain.com. If you can see stats instead of 404 than you are -set.

It's time to add this script to cron with cron -e.

*/10 * * * * sh /var/www/html/stats.domain.com/generate-stats.sh
-

Securing with Basic authentication

You probably don't want stats to be publicly available, so we should create a -user and a password for Basic authentication.

First we create a password for a user stats with htpasswd -c /etc/nginx/.htpasswd stats.

Now we update config file with nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/stats.domain.com. You probably noticed that the -file looks a bit different from before. This is because certbot added -additional rules for SSL.

Your location portion the config file should now look like. You should add -auth_basic and auth_basic_user_file lines to the file.

location / {
-  try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
-  auth_basic "Private Property";
-  auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd;
-}
-

Test if config is still ok with nginx -t and if it is you can restart Nginx -with service nginx restart.

If you now visit https://stats.domain.com you should be prompted for username -and password. If not, try reopening your browser.

That is all. You now have analytics for your server that gets refreshed every 10 -minutes.