Anarcat: Goatcounter analytics in ikiwiki

I have started using Goatcounter for analytics after reading this LWN article called "Lightweight alternatives to Google Analytics". Goatcounter has an interesting approach to privacy in that it:

tracks sessions using a hash of the browser's user agent and IP address to identify the client without storing any personal information. The salt used to generate these hashes is rotated every 4 hours with a sliding window.

There was no Debian package for the project, so I filed a request for package and instead made a fork of the project to add a Docker image.

This page documents how Goatcounter was setup from there...

Server configuration

1. build the image from this fork

   docker build -t zgoat/goatcounter .
   

2. create volume for db:

   docker volume create goatcounter
   

3. start the server:

   exec docker run --restart=unless-stopped --volume="goatcounter:/home/user/db/" --publish 127.0.0.1:8081:8080 --detach zgoat/goatcounter serve -listen :8080 -port 8080 -tls none
   

4. apache configuration:

   <VirtualHost *:80>
               ServerName analytics.anarc.at
               Redirect / https://analytics.anarc.at/
               DocumentRoot /var/www/html/
       </VirtualHost>
   
   
   <VirtualHost *:443>
           ServerName analytics.anarc.at
           Use common-letsencrypt-ssl analytics.anarc.at
           DocumentRoot /var/www/html/
           ProxyPass /.well-known/ !
           ProxyPass / http://localhost:8081/
           ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8081/
           ProxyPreserveHost on
   </VirtualHost>
   

5. add analytics.anarc.at to DNS

6. create a TLS cert with LE:

   certbot certonly --webroot  -d analytics.anarc.at --webroot-path /var/www/html/
   

   note that goatcounter has code to do this on its own, but we avoid it to follow our existing policies and simplify things

7. create site:

   docker run -it --rm --volume="goatcounter:/home/user/db/" zgoat/goatcounter create -domain analytics.anarc.at -email anarcat+rapports@anarc.at
   

8. add to ikiwiki template

9. rebuild wiki:

   ikiwiki --setup ikiwiki.setup --rebuild --verbose
   

Remaining issues

• the :8080 port leaks in some places, namely in the "Site config" documentation
• move to Docker Compose or podman instead of just starting the thing by hand
• this is all super janky and should be put in config management somehow
• remove "anarc.at" test site (the site is the analytics site, not the tracked site), seems like this is not possible yet
• do log parsing instead of Javascript or 1x1 images?
• compare with goaccess logs, probably in september
• goatcounter monitor doesn't with sqlite

Fixed issues

• cache headers are wrong (120ms!) deployed workaround in apache, reported as a bug upstream
• remove self-referer done, just a matter of configuring the URL in the settings. could this be automated too?
• add pixel tracking for noscript users done, but required a patch to ikiwi (and I noticed another bug while doing it)

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