---
title: Using GoAccess with Nginx to replace Google Analytics
url: using-goaccess-with-nginx-to-replace-google-analytics.html
date: 2021-01-25T12:00:00+02:00
type: post
draft: false
---

## 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:

- [Umami](https://umami.is/)
- [Freshlytics](https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics)
- [Matomo](https://matomo.org/)

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](https://goaccess.io/) 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](/posts/goaccess/goaccess-dash-term.png)

*Running in a terminal*

![GoAccess HTML](/posts/goaccess/goaccess-dash-html.png)

*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](https://www.digitalocean.com/). First I
installed [Nginx](https://nginx.org/en/), and
[Letsencrypt](https://letsencrypt.org/getting-started/) certbot and all the
necessary dependencies.

```sh
# 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`.

```sh
# 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
```

```nginx
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.

```sh
apt install goaccess
```

To enable Geo location we also need one additiona thing.

```sh
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.

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

Contents of this file should look like this.

```sh
#!/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`](https://linux.die.net/man/1/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`.

```go
*/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.

```nginx
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.