hhhhhhhhhn / analytics

A simple email/website analytics server

Simple analytics server

A minimalist, self-hosted alternative to analytics tools like Google Analytics.

It does not use any Javascript, but instead relies on invisible 1 by 1 images embedded in your website, whose traffic is logged on a small Rocket.rs server in a simple JSON lines file. Additional information is added using CSS.

Usage

First, you need to set the KEY environment variable to a secret key.

Then, run the server with cargo run --release. It will be accesible through port 8000.

In your website, embed:

<img src="http://{SERVER URL}/{PAGE NAME}/unknown/image.svg"
     style="display: fixed; width: 0; height: 0;">

Where PAGE NAME is a custom name which will be logged. If you want to log which platform is used, use:

<img src="http://{SERVER URL}/{PAGE NAME}/unknown/image.svg"
     srcset="http://{SERVER URL}/{PAGE NAME}/desktop/image.svg 1w, http://{SERVER URL}/{PAGE NAME}/mobile/image.svg 2w"
     sizes="(orientation: portrait) 2px, 1px"
     style="display: fixed; width: 0; height: 0;">

Finally, you can log specific parts of your website by embedding the image with lazy loading in that part.

For example, to learn which users finished an article, you could create a modified PAGE NAME (e.g. adding "-end") and embedding it in the end of the article:

<img src="http://{SERVER URL}/{PAGE NAME}-end/unknown/image.svg"
     srcset="http://{SERVER URL}/{PAGE NAME}-end/desktop/image.svg 1w, http://{SERVER URL}/{PAGE NAME}-end/mobile/image.svg 2w"
     sizes="(orientation: portrait) 2px, 1px"
     style="width: 1px; height: 1px; margin: 0"
     loading="lazy">

To get the logs from the server, you can also use the http://{SERVER URL}/logs endpoint, with your secret key as the body of a POST request.

For example, with curl:

curl "http://{SERVER URL}/logs" -d "{SECRET KEY}"

Example

Use the website/ directory as an example of running the server locally.