Setup Matomo

I like Analytics on a website, I don’t want to use Google Analytics. That leaves me with only a few options, one it to run my own analytics software somewhere I control. Previously I used Piwik with good success, so it seems sensible to set that up. Piwik has been renamed to Matomo and I haven’t found a simple complete installer.

Server Setup

I know that I should use something like Ansible to set it up, but I’m doing it by hand for now.

Based on these instructions Install LEMP Stack, Install Matomo and Nginx and Letsencrypt here’s what I did on a fresh Ubuntu Bionic VM:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt install mariadb-server nginx php-fpm php-mysql php-mbstring php-dom php-xml unzip
$ sudo systemctl start php7.2-fpm
$ sudo systemctl enable php7.2-fpm
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
$ sudo apt install python-certbot-nginx
$ sudo mysql -u root
mysql> CREATE DATABASE matomo;
mysql> CREATE USER `matomo_admin`@`localhost` IDENTIFIED BY 'verysecret';
mysql> GRANT ALL ON matomo.* TO `matomo_admin`@`localhost`;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
^D
$ wget https://builds.matomo.org/piwik.zip
$ unzip piwik.zip
$ sudo cp -r piwik /var/www/
$ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/piwik
$ sudo touch /etc/nginx/sites-available/ch.invisible.matomo

Then edit the newly created file

server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;
        server_name matomo.invisible.ch;

        index index.php;
        root /var/www/piwik;

        access_log /var/log/nginx/ch.invisible.matomo.access_log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/ch.invisible.matomo.error_log;

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }

        location ~ \.php$ {
                include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
                fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
        }
}

Get a certificate and enable the site:

$ sudo certbot --nginx -d matomo.invisible.ch
$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/ch.invisible.matomo /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ch.invisible.matomo
$ sudo rm /etc/nging/sites-enabled/default
$ sudo systemctl restart nginx    

Enter the DNS entries for the server, and it should start responding. Go through the setup wizard, enter matomo_admin for DB user, matomo for DB name, the verysecret password, remove the ‘Table Prefix’. The rest of the wizard should be self explanatory.

Hugo Setup

To enable Matomo Tracking, use hugo-component-matomo. You will also need to enable the AjaxOptOut Plugin in Matomo. (Settings -> Plugins)