Creating a docker ready fork for Plausible Analytics

The following post has been original written in 2020, which is then later re-published in this blog.

As a privacy enthusiasts and advocate, I was searching for a privacy friendly open-source analytics tool for this blog. One of my other requirement was that it should be simple enough for hosting on my k8s cluster (more on that in later posts) and after few searches I ended up finalizing two choices:

• Matomo
• Plausible Analytics

both being opensource was a BIG plus but there are several others too, I excluded some of them as it may be too simple or does not qualify in the privacy part.

But the winner was Plausible because I really like the UI and it had a single page stats that I wanted and more importantly it was written almost entirely in Elixir (one of my other interests). But the problem was that it didn’t have enough support for docker based hosting.

From their readme back then –

At the moment we don’t provide support for easily self-hosting the code. Currently, the purpose of keeping the code open-source is to be transparent with the community about how we collect and process data.

which makes sense being small startup. As I acquired some experiences in field of operations, I decided to make it suitable for “self-hosting”.

Initially, I had no plans to merge these changes into the upstream project and to be clear, I do not work on github anymore so I created a public Gitlab fork and started working there. After the initial announcement, uku was pleasedto hear about the progress and extended his help in untangling me with possible blockers and clarifying issues that helped me in finishing my changes.

After few more discussions, the final pull-request was merged and after some cleanups, now Plausible selfhosting beta is now open 🎉🥳

and announcement on Plausible blog.

There is still much work to do and needs more polishing and hence beta testers are invited. Yes, go ahead and add your issues with the hosting.

I, however, still need to do some modifications to my cluster to accommodate the newly added clickhouse into my cluster. And sadly this blog is still using  sigh Google Analytics (Psst.. privacy mode enabled!), once I have my setup ready, I will de-Google-ify this blog too ✌️!

Update :

Plausible analytics quoted me as one their contributors. Thanks!