Way back in last May, I added site analytics for this blog using goatcounter.

To rehash, goatcounter does not collect PII, does not need cookie banner, does not send data to rando third party service and does not suck.

It is simple, dumb, has graphs to show where traffic comes from (from referral headers) and where it goes (which posts got more views). In recent months it even added a dark mode! I've been quite happy with it, and its perfect for my needs.

At the time of adding it, I did not have my own server, so I used the goatcounter.com service. Even though it never collects user data, it was always planned to eventually self-host the service and bring the data in-house. Thanks to NixOS, these days I manage my own server (a wall-mounted Raspberry Pi 4), and am increasingly confident at being able to keep it running.

For a long while NixOS did not have a goatcounter package, and my Nix-fu was not (and still mostly is not) enough to get it packaged. But recently someone packaged it in nixpkgs, making clear the road to a NixOS module. So I created pull request with barebones NixOS module, which got merged and released to unstable channel this week, finally enabling full self-hosted site analytics for yours truly. I ended up adding below snippet to my NixOS config, and with one nixos-rebuild, it was up and about:

 1{ ... }:
 2{
 3  services = {
 4    goatcounter = {
 5      enable = true;
 6      proxy = true;
 7      address = "127.0.0.1";
 8      port = 5982;
 9    };
10
11    nginx = {
12      virtualHosts = {
13        "analytics.bhankas.org" = {
14          addSSL = true;
15          enableACME = true;
16          locations."/" = {
17            proxyPass = "http://127.0.0.1:5982";
18            proxyWebsockets = true;
19          };
20        };
21      };
22    };
23  };
24
25  security.acme = {
26    acceptTerms = true;
27    certs = {
28      "analytics.bhankas.org" = {
29        email = "[email protected]";
30        dnsResolver = "1.1.1.1:53";
31      };
32    };
33  };
34}

Exporting data from goatcounter is incredibly easy, as is importing it back in your own hosted instance. Once I had done that, I switched the analytics snippet to use my own subdomain, and all is well :)

One happy coincidence is that goatcounter.com is often blocked by ad-blockers, hiding users with them. Nothing wrong with that¹, but its something that slipped through before. Now that the js comes from same domain, most browsers and adblockers should trust it.