jpfluger / website-3-nodejs-session-analytics

A website primer for Node Express session analytics using Redis and Postgres for data storage.

Website 3: NodeJS Session Analytics

A website primer for Node Express sessions using Redis for in-memory storage and Postgres for disk storage. This site is built upon Website 2: NodeJS Marko Templates which uses Marko (v4+), Twitter Bootstrap (v3.3), Bootstrap-Dialog, JQuery, lodash, numeral and moment.

This website template includes support for (simple) page-tracking and user session management.

It also uses a docker-compose to assist in the creation and deletion of Redis/Postgres.

Note: We purposefully retain comments in the source to assist users.

Install docker-compose

Follow the directions to install docker and docker-compose

Redis and Postgres

Run Redis and Postgres in the background.

$ docker-compose -p web3 -f docker-dev.yml up -d

Destroy Redis and Postgres. This will stop the containers if they are already running.

$ docker-compose -p web3 -f docker-dev.yml down

Stop Redis and Postgres but do not destroy them.

$ docker-compose -p web3 -f docker-dev.yml stop

Install node

Download NodeJS and install the version for your operating system.

Install npm and bower modules

We include a script, install.sh that initializes:

• local npm modules in directory node_modules
• local bower modules in directory bower_components

Then it copies only the required files from bower_components/ into public/_third/, a directory we use to serve public web pages.

Run installation:

./install.sh

Run

We've switched to using npm, so we can easily set modes for production or development.

For production mode, run

$ npm run start

For development (debug) mode, run

$ npm run debug

Note: Type Ctrl-C to quit the server.

Open the client web browser to url http://localhost:8080.

Db

When the server starts, the server checks for a valid db connection. If the connection is valid and the db does not exist, then the server will initialize the database using the sql schema found in db/schema.sql.

Sessions Stats

This demo covers these parts to server-side website statistics tracking:

1. Global statistics
   • page tracking
   • parsing user-agent strings
   • ip address plus OPTIONAL locale matching (eg country, city, state) using node-maxmind
2. Individual session connection statistics (this is about the connection and NOT user login)
   • page tracking
   • ip address with location information is passed to the individual session and can be used for decision-making
   • the parsed user-agent string is passed to the individual session and can be used for decision-making

Regarding ip addresses resolution to locale. This demo optionally uses node-maxmind and separately dowwnloaded databases from MaxMind. Depending on your needs, you may want to forgo ip lookups in real-time and instead have a different app analyze ip data later. We like node-maxmind because it includes caching ip-lookup results and watches for updates to the local MaxMind database.

Consider a MaxMind subscription for more up-to-date ip databases for cities. This FAQ discusses MaxMind's accuracy

The install.sh script handles automatic downloads of the MaxMind Db into a maxmind folder. .gitignore is set to ignore any files in the maxmind folder.

Server-side tracking vs client-side tracking

One benefit of client-side tracking is that it allows to capture the time and geometric areas that a user spends on a page. This ties-in with page tracking analytics and ad-view software. This demo does not include this type of tracking. For assistance in developing your own client-side analystics, examine node-analytics

In this demo, statistic tracking is performed server-side and not client-side, like Google Analytics. To integrate your site with Google, consider using the universal-analytics project.

MIT Licensed