Public analytics as a Node.js microservice, no sysadmin experience required.
A tiny analytics server with ~100 lines of code, easy to run and hack around on. It does one thing, and it does it well: count the views of something and making the views publicly accessible via an API.
(there is currently no frontend to display pretty graphs, feel free to build one yourself!)
Running your own micro-analytics is just two tiny commands away:
npm install -g micro-analytics-cli
micro-analytics
That's it, the analytics server is now running at localhost:3000! 🎉
See server-setup.md for instructions on acquiring a server and setting up nginx to make your micro-analytics publicly available.
Note: You can pass any option to the
micro-analyticscommand that you can pass tomicro. As an example, to change the host you'd domicro-analytics -H 127.0.0.1
To track a view of x, simply send a request to /x. This is how you'd track page views for a website: (though note that this can be used to track anything you want)
<script>
fetch('servicedomain.com' + window.location.pathname)
// Log total pageviews for current page to console
.then(response => response.json())
.then(json => console.log(json.views))
.catch(err => console.log('Something went wrong:', err))
</script>If you send a GET request, the request will increment the views and return the total views for the id. (in this case "x") If you send a POST request, the views will increment but you don't get the total views back.
If you just want to get the views for an id and don't want to increment the views during a GET request, set inc to false in your query parameter. (/x?inc=false)
If you want to get all views for all ids, set the all query parameter to true on a root request. (i.e. /?all=true) If you pass the all parameter to an id, all ids starting with that pathname will be included. E.g. /x?all=true will match views for /x, /xyz but not /y.
By default, micro-analytics uses flat-file-db, a fast in-process flat file database, which makes for easy setup and backups.
This works fine for side-project usage, but for a production application with bajillions of visitors you might want to use a real database with a database adapter. Install the necessary npm package (e.g. micro-analytics-adapter-xyz) and then specify the DB_ADAPTER environment variable: $ DB_ADAPTER=xyz micro-analytics
These are the available database adapters, made by the community:
Don't see your favorite database here? Writing your own adapter is super easy! See writing-adapters.md for a simple step-by-step guide.
Copyright ©️ 2017 Maximilian Stoiber, licensed under the MIT License. See license.md for more information.