When I was building Chekkin, I needed some basic analytics to track how many people were coming to the site. Though I've used Google Analytics in the

Easy site analytics with no Javascript, using GoAccess and shell scripts

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2021-08-01 15:00:02

When I was building Chekkin, I needed some basic analytics to track how many people were coming to the site. Though I've used Google Analytics in the past, I decided not to go back to it for two reasons:

Searching revealed plenty of alternatives, but what ultimately caught my eye was GoAccess–it's free, open source, and since it works by analyzing log files, there's no need for any Javascript.

There were two major drawbacks with GoAccess. One was that, since my server rotates log files, I'd eventually lose stats from older than ~60 days. The other was that out of the box, GoAccess has no way to filter by date. It just works with everything in any of the log files you give it, so it's not easy to analyze traffic from only the last day, or week, or month.

First, we'll need to get all the site log files we want to analyze. As mentioned above, my log files are rotated, but I didn't want to lose stats on old traffic.

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