PIWIK stats install on Ubuntu

Posted under » PHP » SEO on 02 May 2012

Download PIWIK web analytics. Upload to server. Create a mysql table.

Go to your site. And it will guide you step by step. eg.

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/piwik

This is because it wants to create a configuration for you.

Then it will ask your mysql connection settings.

Then it will ask your user name and password

Finally it will ask for a website that you wish to collect the stats. It has to start with one website but you can add more later.

PIWIK is primarily a real time stats software but you can process logs too but this is only available on version 1.8 and above.

python /var/www/piwik/misc/log-analytics/import_logs.py --url=http://piwik.com/ /var/log/apache2/access-www-piwik.log --idsite=1

This is a huge advantage over AWSTATS. It can process Apache logs locally or over http. But of course it can also do it live via javascript just like google analytics.

Take note of the

url: The URL where the stats software resides.
idsite: You can have many website config but each config has its own id.
if you have log rotation, you can combine it all using AWSTAT logresolvemerge.pl tool.

Overall, I think this is much simpler installation than perl's AWSTATS. The fact that this software is awesome and regurlarly updated makes it a winner.