What's the best way to make your own stats collector for your site?

Question

Yo guys! So I have a website for my personal brand but I have no clue if people are visiting it and stuff. So I decided to add some way to collect stats. I don't want to use any third party services, and I only need to collect very basic data, most of which are already in the HTTP headers.

Since a lot of you are very experienced with web development, I thought it'd be a good idea to ask you guys about what's the best way to achieve this? What languages do you think will be needed? I presume some PHP is required but would like to have a second opinion! Also are there any open source projects related to this already? I found dumprequest.php which seems to be a good starting point that I can modify later, but I wonder if there's already something like what I'm looking for...

Answer 1

Good question. I'm following this thread.

I was looking at Matomo via softaculous on the server. It is 3rd party, but I have to be careful about GDPR rules , I have not used the code yet. But this topic interests me.

Answer 2

@Xyenia Matomo does seem interesting, I'll look into it a bit deeper! Their website does say that they're 'GDPR Compliant'.

Answer 3

Daniel Fernandes Yes, I think they are are. There is a mention of anonymized IP addresses which gives you an idea of your visitor but not their full IP address.

I guess the pain in the backside, is to create a privacy statement, with your GDPR points covered.

Answer 4

I have created a PHP script to collect stats on all visits to all my sites. Privacy statements are not really needed if you don't plan on sharing your information. I collect IP, locations, ISP's and so on. A base script is not that hard to create, i could help if needed.