Crumby

Crumby is an open source application for tracking and reporting visitor usage of a website. Crumby is a Flask application so it works with well known tools such as Apache, MySQL, and Python. Crumby includes a simple web-based frontend and a JSON compliant RESTful API for reporting. Queries are assigned to a public or private endpoint. Private queries are only accessible by authenticated users.

Architecture

Crumby App

The Crumby app is developed with Python and Flask so it can be used with any server that supports the Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI). The Crumby app includes a command line interface for administration, a reporting module, and a tracking module.

Crumby CLI

The command line interface is used to administer the Crumby app, try crumby -h from the terminal to print help on this command.

usage: crumby [-h] {adduser,deluser,env,geoip,init,run,users} ...

A command line interface for the Crumby web analytics app.

positional arguments:
  {adduser,deluser,env,geoip,init,run,users}
    adduser             add user - grant private query access
    deluser             delete user - revoke private query access
    env                 display Flask configuration values
    geoip               download latest geoip database
    init                create template config file
    run                 launch Crumby in development server
    users               view list of users

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

Reporting Module

Apart from querying the database directly, visit and event records can be viewed at a webpage or consumed through the JSON compliant RESTful API. The default locations for these resources are:

Webpage: https://<crumby.host>
API: https://<crumby.host>/api

Crumby ships with some built in queries which show common tracking metrics (e.g. visits per day, most popular pages, visitors location of origin). These queries are segmented into two groups: public and private. Public queries can be accessed by anyone. Private queries require authentication.

Tracking Module

The tracking module contains the cmb.js script and configures endpoints for receiving tracking data.

Crumby Database

A SQL database is required to store tracking data. Any database compatible with SQLAlchemy can be used. The following tables will be initialized when Crumby first runs:

calendar - A range of dates available for queries
events - Visitor interactions with the website
users - Users permitted to access private queries
visits - Visitors to the website

calendar

Column	Category	Description
datetime	General	Date and time

events

Column	Category	Description
id	General	Unique record ID
ip	General	IP address
cid	General	Visitor ID (cookie)
datetime	General	Date and time event occurred
doc_title	Page	Page title
doc_uri	Page	Page URI
name	Action	Name of the event
value	Action	Value of the event

users

Column	Category	Description
id	General	Unique record ID
username	Login	Username
password	Login	Hashed password

visits

Column	Category	Description
id	General	Unique record ID
ip	General	IP address
cid	General	Visitor ID (cookie)
datetime	General	Date and time page accessed
doc_title	Page	Page title
doc_uri	Page	Page URI
doc_enc	Page	Encoding of page
referrer	General	Referrer from client browser
_referrer	General	Referrer from request header
platform	Hardware/Software	Browser platform
browser	Hardware/Software	Browser name
version	Hardware/Software	Browser version
screen_res	Hardware/Software	Browser screen resolution
screen_depth	Hardware/Software	Browser screen depth
continent	Geospatial	Continent
country	Geospatial	Country
subdivision_1	Geospatial	Subdivisions
subdivision_2	Geospatial	Subdivisions
city	Geospatial	City
latitude	Geospatial	Latitude
longitude	Geospatial	Longitude
accuracy_radius	Geospatial	Geo accuracy
time_zone	Geospatial	Time zone
lang	General	Language from client browser
_lang	General	Language from request header

Geospatial Database (geoip.mmdb)

Crumby geolocates visits with the MaxMind geoip2 library and the GeoLite2 City database.

Web Pages

Tracking visits to a webpage with Crumby is simple. Just add a pointer to the analytics server cmb.js script. The pointer should be included in the source code of any page that should be tracked, likely at the bottom of the body to allow other content to load first.

<script src="https://<crumby.host>/cmb.js"></script>

To track events (e.g. button click), make a call to cmb.event(<name>, <value>) when the event is triggered.

Getting Started

Setup WSGI Hosting Environment:

There are many ways to deploy flask applications like crumby. Refer to the Flask Deployment Options for several Hosted and Self-hosted options. At a minimum a WSGI server environment is needed to deploy the crumby app.

Install a SQL Database:

Install a database supported by SQL Alchemy
Install associated python database drivers (e.g. pymysql)

Install Crumby:

Installation will vary depending on the WSGI hosting environment selected.

For hosted options, you may need the package source code, which can be found on github:

    git clone https://github.com/bmweiner/crumby.git

For self-hosted options, you may want to install Crumby from PyPI:

    pip install crumby

Note: Some Crumby dependencies require extra software to build properly. If you encounter errors during install, try installing gcc, libffi, and python development headers, before installing Crumby. Hint: sudo yum install gcc libffi-devel python-devel

Install the latest geoip database:
```
 cd ~
 crumby geoip
```
Initialize an example config file and enter configuration values:
```
 crumby init
 vi crumby.cfg
```

See Crumby Configuration for a description of available configuration options. Current configuration variables values can be viewed with the crumby CLI:

    crumby env

Tell crumby how to find the configuration file by setting an environment variable named: CRUMBY_SETTINGS to the config file path:
```
 export CRUMBY_SETTINGS=/Users/username/crumby.cfg
```
Deploy Crumby:

Follow instructions for the deployment option selected to deploy the crumby app.

Crumby Configuration

Crumby uses a configuration file to setup the application environment. Configuration values are used by Crumby and it's dependencies at runtime. In addition to the following commonly used configuration values, please refer to Flask, Flask-SQLAlchemy, and Flask-Login documentation for their respective options.

Set the value of an environment variable named CRUMBY_SETTINGS to the location of the crumby configuration file and restart your server to apply changes. For example:

export CRUMBY_SETTINGS=/Users/username/crumby.cfg

Key	Type	Default	Value
DOMAIN	str	'localhost:5000'	Domain name of the server where crumby is installed.
SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI	str	‘sqlite:///~/crumby.db’	SQL Database URL, follows the SQLAlchemy syntax.
GEOIP2_DATABASE_NAME	str	‘~/GeoLite2-City.mmdb’	Absolute path to the GeoIP database.
SECRET_KEY	str	None	Used to encrypt things. Must be set for SSL/TLS.
SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE	bool	False	Controls if the cookie should be set with the secure flag.
PROXY_COUNT	int	0	Count of proxy server hops to remove when finding clients IP address.
CROSSDOMAIN_ORIGIN	str or iterable	‘*’	URL(s) permitted to access the crumby API.
SQLALCHEMY_TRACK_MODIFICATIONS	bool	False	Track modifications of objects and emit signals.
DEBUG		False	enable/disable Flask debug mode
SQLALCHEMY_ECHO		False	Log all the statements issued to stderr.

Development Server

Crumby can be run in the Flask development server (not recommended for production) with the crumby CLI:

crumby run

Adding Queries

Crumby ships with a bunch of SQL queries which live in Crumby/templates/api under the private or public directory. Public queries can be viewed by anyone and private queries require authentication.

New queries can be added to the public and private directories. These queries will be automatically added to the crumby webpage and API. The following guidelines should be followed:

One text file per query with the extension .sql
The filename will be the name of the query
Queries must follow the syntax of the SQL database used

Refer to the Crumby Database section for table names, field names, and descriptions.

Advanced Queries

Queries are templates processed by Flask using the Jinja2 syntax. Refer to the Jinja2 Template Designer Documentation to customize your queries.

By default, every query is passed the following variables:

t0: Start Time, default today - 30 days
t1: End Time, default: today

These variables are created using query string parameters passed with a request to the crumby API. Refer to the crumby API https://<crumby.host>/api/public, for specifications on the API interface.

days, int. number of consecutive days to retrieve before today.
from, str in form YYY-MM-DD. start date of date range.
to, str in form YYY-MM-DD. end date of date range.

This is helpful if you want to constrain a query by time, for example returning the count of unique users within a certain date range:

SELECT date(datetime) as date, count(distinct cid) as users
FROM visits
GROUP BY date
WHERE date(datetime) between date("{{t0}}") and date("{{t1}}")

Managing Users

To view private queries, users must be authenticated. Users can be listed, added, or removed with the crumby CLI:

crumby users
crumby adduser name password
crumby deluser name

Deployment Examples

Check out the crumby\deployment directory for some example deployment scripts and configurations.

bmweiner / crumby