arp242/goatcounter

GoatCounter is an open source web analytics platform available as a (free) hosted service or self-hosted app. It aims to offer easy to use and meaningful privacy-friendly web analytics as an alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo.

There are two ways to run this: as hosted service on goatcounter.com, or run it on your own server. The source code is completely Open Source/Free Software, and it can be self-hosted without restrictions.

There's a live demo at https://stats.arp242.net.

Please consider contributing financially.

Features

• Privacy-aware; doesn’t track users with unique identifiers and doesn't need a GDPR notice. Fine-grained control over which data is collected. Also see the privacy policy and GDPR consent notices.

• Lightweight and fast; adds just ~3.5K of extra data to your site. Also has JavaScript-free "tracking pixel" option, or you can use it from your application's middleware or import from logfiles.

• Identify unique visits without cookies using a non-identifiable hash (technical details).

• Keeps useful statistics such as browser information, location, and screen size. Keep track of referring sites and campaigns.

• Easy; if you've been confused by the myriad of options and flexibility of Google Analytics and Matomo that you don't need then GoatCounter will be a breath of fresh air.

• Accessibility is a high-priority feature, and the interface works well with assistive technology such as screen readers.

• 100% committed to open source; you can see exactly what the code does and make improvements, or self-host it for any purpose.

• Own your data; you can always export all data and cancel at any time.

• Integrate on your site with just a single script tag:

  <script data-goatcounter="https://yoursite.goatcounter.com/count"
          async src="//gc.zgo.at/count.js"></script>

• The JavaScript integration is a good option for most, but you can also use a no-JavaScript image-based tracker, integrate it in your backend middleware, or parse log files.

Getting data in to GoatCounter

There are three ways:

1. Add the JavaScript code on your site; this is the easiest and most common method. Detailed documentation for this is available at https://www.goatcounter.com/code

2. Use the HTTP/REST API, for example from your backend server middleware. Detailed documentation for this is available at https://www.goatcounter.com/api#backend-integration

3. Parse logfiles of nginx, Apache, Caddy, CloudFront, or any other HTTP server or proxy. See goatcounter help import for detailed documentation on this (this works both for the self-hosted version and goatcounter.com).

Self-hosting GoatCounter

The release page has binaries for several platforms. These are statically compiled and contain everything you need. These should work in pretty much any environment. The only dependency is somewhere to store a SQLite database file or a PostgreSQL connection. Alternatively you can use Docker, as documented in the section below.

Running

You can start a server with:

% goatcounter serve

This will start a server on *:8080. The default is to use an SQLite database at ./goatcounter-data/db.sqlite3, which will be created if it doesn't exist yet.

Both SQLite and PostgreSQL are supported. SQLite should work well for most smaller sites, but PostgreSQL gives better performance especially for larger sites. The main bottleneck is not so much the number of pageviews, but how spread out they are over different pages (10 million pageviews spread out over 5 pages is quite fast even on SQLite, but spread out over 1 million different pages is much slower).

To create the first site, use the wizard on http://localhost:8080 or the CLI with:

% goatcounter db create site -vhost=stats.example.com -user.email=me@example.com

This will ask for a password; you can also add a password on the commandline with -password. You must also pass the -db flag here if you use something other than the default.

GoatCounter includes TLS and automatic ACME certificate generation; to run in production you probably want something like:

% goatcounter serve -listen=:443 -tls=tls,rdr,acme

See goatcounter help serve for details.

PostgreSQL

To use PostgreSQL, run GoatCounter with a custom -db flag. For example:

% goatcounter serve -db 'postgresql+dbname=goatcounter'
% goatcounter serve -db 'postgresql+host=/run/postgresql dbname=goatcounter sslmode=disable'

This follows the format in the psql CLI; you can also use the PG* environment variables:

% PGDATABASE=goatcounter PGHOST=/run/postgresql goatcounter serve -db 'postgresql'

The database will be created automatically if possible; if you want to create it for a specific user you can use:

% createuser --interactive --pwprompt goatcounter
% createdb --owner goatcounter goatcounter

You can manually import the schema with:

% goatcounter db schema-pgsql | psql --user=goatcounter --dbname=goatcounter

See goatcounter help db and the pq docs for more details.

Running with Docker

GoatCounter is available on DockerHub at arp242/goatcounter.

Example to run a new container:

% docker run \
    -p 8080:8080 \
    -v goatcounter-data:/home/goatcounter/goatcounter-data \
    arp242/goatcounter

This uses a named volume, which is recommended as this stores the SQLite database and ACME certificates (when using ACME) and anonymous volumes can be easy to accidentally delete.

To create the first site, use the wizard on http://localhost:8080 or the CLI with:

% docker exec -it [..] goatcounter db create site -vhost=stats.example.com -user.email=me@example.com

To set options you can use GOATCOUNTER_.. environment variables. For example to enable TLS and automatic certificate generation:

% docker run \
    -p 80:80 \
    -p 443:443 \
    -v goatcounter-data:/home/goatcounter/goatcounter-data \
    -e GOATCOUNTER_LISTEN=:443 \
    -e GOATCOUNTER_TLS=tls,rdr,acme \
    arp242/goatcounter

Set GOATCOUNTER_DB to use PostgreSQL. For example:

% docker run \
    -p 8080:8080 \
    -v goatcounter-data:/home/goatcounter/goatcounter-data \
    -e GOATCOUNTER_DB='postgresql+postgresql://goatcounter:goatcounter@postgres:5432/goatcounter?sslmode=disable' \
    arp242/goatcounter

See goatcounter help serve (or: docker run --rm arp242/goatcounter help serve) for all options.

All of the above should also work with Podman.

You can also run GoatCounter from compose.yaml with docker compose. For a basic SQLite setup:

% docker compose up -d goatcounter-sqlite

Or PostgreSQL (also starts PostgreSQL from compose.yaml):

% docker compose up -d goatcounter-postgres

Management

A Server management page is available at Settings → Server management, which can be useful to debug and test some things.

A status URL is available at /status, which can be used for health monitors.

Updating

You may need to run the database migrations when updating. Use goatcounter serve -automigrate to always run all pending migrations on startup.

Use goatcounter db migrate <file> or goatcounter db migrate all to manually run migrations.

Use goatcounter db migrate pending to get a list of pending migrations, or goatcounter db migrate list to show all migrations.

Building from source

You need Go 1.21 or newer and a C compiler. If you compile it with CGO_ENABLED=0 you don't need a C compiler but can only use PostgreSQL.

You can build from source with:

% git clone --branch=release-2.7 https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter
% cd goatcounter
% go build ./cmd/goatcounter

Which will produce a goatcounter binary in the current directory.

To use the latest development version switch to the main branch.

To build a fully statically linked binary:

% go build -trimpath -ldflags='-s -w -extldflags=-static' \
    -tags='osusergo,netgo,sqlite_omit_load_extension' \
    ./cmd/goatcounter

It's recommended to use the latest release as in the above command. The main branch should be reasonably stable but no guarantees, and sometimes I don't write detailed release/upgrade notes until the actual release so you may run in to surprises.

You can compile goatcounter without cgo if you're planning to use PostgreSQL and don't use SQLite:

% CGO_ENABLED=0 go build ./cmd/goatcounter

This will create a statically linked binary by default; no extra flags needed. Functionally it doesn't matter too much, but builds will be a bit easier and faster as you won't need a C compiler.

Development/testing

You can start a test/development server with:

% goatcounter serve -dev

The -dev flag makes some small things a bit more convenient for development: the application will automatically restart on recompiles, templates and static files will be read directly from the filesystem, and a few other minor changes.

See .github/CONTRIBUTING.md for more details on how to run a development server, write patches, etc.