GoatCounter is a web analytics platform, roughly similar to Google Analytics or Matomo. It aims to give meaningful privacy-friendly web analytics for business purposes, while still staying usable for non-technical users to use on personal websites. The choices that currently exist are between freely hosted but with problematic privacy (e.g. Google Analytics), hosting your own complex software or paying $19/month (e.g. Matomo), or extremely simplistic "vanity statistics".

There are two ways to run this: as hosted service on goatcounter.com, free for non-commercial use, or run it on your own server.

See docs/rationale.markdown for some more details on the "why?" of this project.

There's a live demo at https://stats.arp242.net.

Please consider donating if you're self-hosting GoatCounter so I can pay my rent :-)

Features

• Privacy-aware; doesn't track users with unique identifiers and doesn't need a GDPR consent notice. Also see the privacy policy.

• Lightweight and fast; adds just ~3K (~1.5K compressed) of extra data to your site. Also has JavaScript-free "tracking pixel" option, or you can use it from your application's middleware.

• Easy; if you've been confused by the myriad of options and flexibility of Google Analytics and Matomo that you don't need then GoatCounter will be a breath of fresh air.

• Accessibility is a high-priority feature, and the interface works well with screen readers, no JavaScript, and even text browsers (although not all features work equally well without JS).

• 100% committed to open source; you can see exactly what the code does and make improvements.

• Own your data; you can always export all data and cancel at any time.

• Integrate on your site with just a single script tag:

  <script data-goatcounter="https://yoursite.goatcounter.com/count"
          async src="//gc.zgo.at/count.js"></script>
  

• The JavaScript integration is a good option for most, but you can also use a no-JavaScript image-based tracker or integrate in your backend middleware.

Technical

• Fast: can handle about 800 hits/second on a $5/month Linode VPS using the default settings.

• Self-contained binary: everything – including static assets – is in a single ~7M statically compiled binary. The only other thing you need is a SQLite database file or PostgreSQL connection (no way around that).

Running your own

Building

There are binaries on the releases page, or compile from source with:

$ git clone https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter.git
$ cd goatcounter
$ go build ./cmd/goatcounter

You'll now have a goatcounter binary in the current directory.

The master branch should be reasonably stable. You can get a specific release by checking out the branch for the latest version: git checkout v1.0.0.

It's not recommended to use go get in GOPATH mode since that will ignore the versions in go.mod.

Go 1.13 and newer are supported (it follows the Go release policy). You will need a C compiler (for SQLite) or PostgreSQL.

Running

You can start the server with:

goatcounter serve -dev

The default is to use a SQLite database at ./db/goatcounter.sqlite3 (will be created if it doesn't exist). See the -db flag to customize this.

You can create new sites with the create command:

goatcounter create -email [email protected] -domain stats.example.com

If you use a custom DB, you must also pass the -db flag here.

The -dev flag makes some small things a bit more convenient for development, such as logins. For a production environment run something like:

goatcounter serve \
   -smtp         'smtp://localhost:25' \
   -emailerrors  '[email protected]'

-smtp is required to send login emails. You can use something like Mailtrap if you just want it for yourself, but you can also use your Gmail or whatnot.

Updating

You may need to run run database migrations when updating. Use goatcounter -automigrate to always run all pending migrations on startup. This is the easiest way, although arguably not the "best" way.

Use goatcounter migrate <file> or goatcounter migrate all to manually run migrations; generally you want to upload the new version, run migrations while the old one is still running, and then restart so the new version takes effect.

Use goatcounter migrate show to get a list of pending migrations.

PostgreSQL

Both SQLite and PostgreSQL are supported. SQLite should work well for the vast majority of people and is the recommended database engine. PostgreSQL will not be faster in most cases, and the chief reason for adding support in the first place is to support load balancing web requests over multiple servers. To use it:

1. Create the database, unlike SQLite it's not done automatically:

   $ createdb goatcounter
   $ psql goatcounter -c '\i db/schema.pgsql'
   $ goatcounter migrate all
   

2. Run with custom -db flag:

   $ goatcounter serve \
       -db           'postgresql://user=goatcounter dbname=goatcounter sslmode=disable' \
       -smtp         'smtp://localhost:25' \
       -emailerrors  '[email protected]'
   

   See the pq docs for more details on the connection string.

3. You can compile goatcounter without cgo if you don't use SQLite:

   $ CGO_ENABLED=0 go build
   

   Functionally it doesn't matter too much, but builds will be a bit easier and faster as it won't require a C compiler.

Development

See .github/CONTRIBUTING.markdown for details on how to run a development server, write patches, etc.