Analyze This: A take on Plausible

Last month I published the blog post Git Commands You Probably Do Not Need. It seemed to have caused a bit of a buzz as it peaked on the orange site and other aggregators. I received quite a bit of pleasant feedback from it, which I’m thankful for.

I write blog posts because I enjoy writing and I don’t feel like I have any agenda besides the creative outlet it provides. I also have no immediate goal of defining myself as a content creator simply because I do not have any expectation for this blog to ever generate any significant revenue. I try to keep a healthy balance between not feeling pressured into producing content while maintaining the necessary personal discipline required to finish off a post.

That said, I did feel a rush knowing that stuff I’d written struck a chord with the community.

Being in the “15 minutes of fame” limelight there’s no doubt there would have been a periodic surge of traffic to the site. I wouldn’t know the numbers though, because I’ve been reluctant to add any analytics or metrics to the site at all. In the end, curiosity got the best of me, and so I went in search of a privacy-minded, light-weight solution able to provide me with some basic visitor insights.

Google Analytics & access logs 🪵

Several years ago I did have Google Analytics integrated and running on the site for a while. However, with the increased focus on privacy through GDPR, cookie consent and what have you I saw no reason to keep tracking users for the relatively low volume traffic I was receiving. After all, at that point I was running a static website off a Linode nanode VPS with an nginx web server serving static files. If I wanted to check for traffic, I had the basic access logs from nginx¹.

A little under a year ago I wrote another another post about my dotfile history which seemed to attract the attention of the interwebs briefly appearing on the orange site front page. At that time my little Linode server was happily serving off the static website and I was able to get some sense of the page views based on the nginx access logs.

GitHub Pages 📃

Some time later I decided to simplify my blog deployment by hosting it off GitHub Pages. Although I had no big issues with the Linode hosting it just didn’t make much sense to me with regards to the manual management of deployment and operations vs. the reliability and performance of Pages. Adding a GitHub workflow triggering a nix build of the static assets then deploying them was just too simple to ignore:

The major disadvantage of switching to GitHub Pages was to forfeit any kind of application insights. It didn’t bother me at first, because all I wanted was to ensure that the blog was up². However, once a post blew up it would be interesting to at least have some numbers reflecting the amount of traffic going to the site.

Plausible Analytics 📈

I must admit that I didn’t spend much effort researching the alternatives for privacy-minded, cookie-less analytics solutions. Coincidentally, I recently found A Brief Comparison of 10+ Best Google Analytics Alternatives on Lobsters which does seem to go into a decent selection of analytics alternatives.

Before reading the above summary I had already decided on Plausible. Primarily because of a good first impression and some second-hand experiences from others.

Hosted vs. self-hosting

Plausible provides a hosted service for what seems like a decent price. What sold it to me though was the fact that it’s open source and quite simple to self-host. I wanted to go down the self-host route because I still have some VPS servers for other minor things which should quite easily manage the additional overhead of running the Plausible backend service.

If you’re here just for adding some analytics then I would definitely suggest to give the hosted solution a go, both for simplicity and for financial support to the Plausible team.

Setup

The github.com/plausible/hosting repository contains the necessary docker compose setup to spin up the self-hosted setup, as documented in the Self-Hosting section of the Plausible documentation. The steps are replicated here for my own sake. I would direct anybody eager to try out self-hosting Plausible for themselves to first and foremost consult the official documentation.

Here are the steps:

1. Clone the hosting repo

   $ curl -L https://github.com/plausible/hosting/archive/master.tar.gz | tar -xz
   $ cd hosting-master

2. Add required configuration

   Generate a secret key for the application by setting SECRET_KEY_BASE in plausible-conf.env.

   $ openssl rand -base64 64 | tr -d '\n' ; echo

   Also, set the BASE_URL by specifying the base url of the instance, including the URL scheme (e.g. https://stats.example.com).

3. Start the server

   $ docker-compose up -d

At this point the service should be accessible on http://localhost:8000. It’s highly advisable to setup a reverse proxy with SSL in front though.

Graphs

And bam! Stats are live and stuff seems to work:

My numbers won’t impress anybody at this rate, but again, that’s not what I’m here for.

Updating Plausible

The self-hosting docs states that the self-hosted version is “somewhat of a LTS”. This means self-hosting using the Docker Hub containers won’t contain the latest and greatest Plausible features. It also means that updates will be less frequent. However, there will be a need to upgrade Plausible at some point, which is basically just a matter of pulling new Docker images and restarting the services:

$ docker-compose down --remove-orphans
$ docker-compose pull plausible
$ docker-compose up -d

Conclusion

There’s not really much to conclude after enabling and running these analytics only for a few days. Getting started with self-hosting Plausible was a breeze and I see numbers come in. Hopefully the numbers are fairly accurate. My personal browser privacy plugins denies the Plausible hits from my browser to be registered. Which means that many page views will never reach my backend. I don’t mind. It’s motivating just to see my articles having any kind of reach, and I hope people will continue to find some of them either insightful or interesting.

Footnotes