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readme.md

micro-analytics 📈

Public analytics as a Node.js microservice, no sysadmin experience required.

A tiny analytics server, easy to run and hack around on. It does one thing, and it does it well: count the views of something and making the views publicly accessible via an API.

(there is currently no frontend to display pretty graphs, feel free to build one yourself!)

Setup

Running your own micro-analytics is just two tiny commands away:

npm install -g micro-analytics-cli

micro-analytics

That's it, the analytics server is now running at localhost:3000! 🎉

To deploy a server either refer to server-setup.md for instructions on manually acquiring and setting up a server or use now and deploy with a single command:

$ now micro-analytics/micro-analytics-cli

> Deployment complete! https://micro-analytics-asfdasdf.now.sh

Note: Since now deploys are stateless we have to store data in memory, which means after every new deploy or when the server sleeps your data will be lost. You'll need to use some remote database hosting service with one of the database adapters to persist data!

Usage

Tracking views

To track a view of x, simply send a request to /x. This is how you'd track page views for a website: (though note that this can be used to track anything you want)

<script>
  fetch('servicedomain.com' + window.location.pathname)
    // Log total pageviews for current page to console
    .then(response => response.json())
    .then(json => console.log(json.views))
    .catch(err => console.log('Something went wrong:', err))
</script>

If you send a GET or POST request, the request will increment the views and return the total views for the id (in this case "x").

GET the views without incrementing

If you just want to get the views for an id and don't want to increment the views during a GET request, set inc to false in your query parameter. (/x?inc=false)

POST to add metadata

You can add more metadata to the view by posting a JSON payload with the field meta. Everything in that meta field will be set on meta in the view object. You can read the data out with the all option, see below for more info. Example request that will post the browser useragent string:

<script>
  fetch('servicedomain.com' + window.location.pathname, {
    method: "POST",
    credentials: "include",
    headers: {"Content-Type": "application/json"},
    body: JSON.stringify({meta: { browser: navigator.userAgent }}),
  })
</script>

Getting all views

If you want to get all views for all ids, set the all query parameter to true on a root request. (i.e. /?all=true) If you pass the all parameter to an id, all ids starting with that pathname will be included. E.g. /x?all=true will match views for /x, /xyz but not /y.

Options

$ micro-analytics --help
Usage: micro-analytics [options] [command]

Commands:

  help  Display help

Options:

  -a, --adapter [value]  Database adapter used (defaults to "flat-file-db")
  -h, --help             Output usage information
  -H, --host [value]     Host to listen on (defaults to "0.0.0.0")
  -p, --port <n>         Port to listen on (defaults to 3000)
  -v, --version          Output the version number

Database adapters

By default, micro-analytics uses flat-file-db, a fast in-process flat file database, which makes for easy setup and backups.

This works fine for side-project usage, but for a production application with bajillions of visitors you might want to use a real database with a database adapter. Install the necessary npm package (e.g. micro-analytics-adapter-xyz) and then specify the DB_ADAPTER environment variable: $ DB_ADAPTER=xyz micro-analytics or use the --adapter cli option.

These are the available database adapters, made by the community:

Don't see your favorite database here? Writing your own adapter is pretty easy, we've even written the tests for you! See writing-adapters.md for a guide on how to write an adapter for your database of choice.

Live updates

micro-analytics let's you listen into updates live with server-sent events. That means you can e.g. build a realtime dashboard for your analytics!

Note: Make sure your database adapter supports this feature. If not, bug them to implement it! micro-analytics will tell you when it starts up if it is supported, so the easiest way to find out is to start it up.

The example below shows how you can listen for events in the browser, just swap my-deploy.now.sh with your own domain and give it a try:

const sse = new EventSource('https://my-deploy.now.sh/_realtime')
sse.onopen = function () { console.log('[sse] open') }
sse.onerror = function (error) { console.error('[sse error]', error) }
sse.addEventListener('micro-analytics-ping', function (e) { console.log('[sse]', e) })

Browser support

Server-sent events are not supported in all browsers. There are great, tiny polyfills available, but before you include one take a look at the caniuse table for server-sent events if you need one based on the browsers you support.

Polyfills that are supported:

Note: This list is from the documentation of the sse library we use rexxars/sse-channel, check that repo because it might have been updated.

Demo

We have a demo instance on demo.micro-analytics.io automatically deploys the master branch from this repository. Feel free to use it to test your clients.

License

Copyright ©️ 2017 Maximilian Stoiber & Rolf Erik Lekang, licensed under the MIT License. See license.md for more information.