Offering Pre-built Plausible Binaries for Ubuntu Linux

[ShenZhouHong]

Hello, Team at Plausible!

Thank you for your wonderful work in creating Plausible Analytics. Your privacy-friendly, ethical analytics platform offers a compelling alternative to site-owners, and the open source nature of the project allows deployment in a variety of environments!

I am in the process of packaging Plausible Analytics for Cloudron, a managed self-hosting platform (think of it as a private, self-hosted Heroku). As a part of the packaging process, one of the difficulties that I encountered was building binaries for Ubuntu Linux. Although Plausible's self-hosting repository offers a great turn-key solution for hobbyists, other users may need to run Plausible outside of Docker: either as a part of their own infrastructure, or within an alternative packaging/containerization scheme (which is my use-case).

The Problem
Since the Plausible repository does not offer pre-built binaries, users with these use-cases may run into difficulties, especially for those unfamiliar with the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem. This is doubly true for those wishing to deploy Plausible on Ubuntu Linux. The Dockerfile at Plausible/Analytics is defined upon an Alpine Linux base image, which creates binaries that are incompatible in non-Alpine environments. Hence building Plausible is a non-trivial process.

The Solution
In order to solve this problem, I have created a repository that offers pre-built Plausible binaries for Ubuntu Linux. This repository contains a Dockerfile that defines the necessary tooling for an Ubuntu Linux environment, builds the Plausible binaries, and exports them as releases using Github Actions. The intended use-case for this repository is to offer a convenient way for users to build Ubuntu-compatible Plausible binaries. You may find my repository at the following link:

• https://github.com/ShenZhouHong/plausible-ubuntu-binaries

Please feel free to take a look at the Dockerfile, and let me know if there are any changes or improvements that I can make to it. I hope to also offer builds for CentOS/RHEL and BSD-based systems in the future.

I hope this repository will be a useful community-resource for users who are deploying Plausible within their own infrastructure, or other packaging maintainers. Thank you once more for your excellent work at Plausible!