To have some statistics about my blog I decided to install goatcounter , an Open Source web analytics tool with no tracking. I always try to self host my stuff so let’s start.

1. First install go to be able to compile goatcounter:

doas pkg_add go

2. Then clone the git repo and build it like described at the github page:

git clone https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter.git
cd goatcounter
go build -tags osusergo,netgo,sqlite_omit_load_extension \
  -ldflags="-X zgo.at/goatcounter/v2.Version=$(git log -n1 --format='%h_%cI') -extldflags=-static" \
  ./cmd/goatcounter

3. Copy the binary to /usr/local/bin (at the destination server) and make it executable:

cp goatcounter /usr/local/bin
chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/goatcounter

4. Create a user under which goatcounter should run. User names for daemons under OpenBSD usually start with an underscore. To check which uid/gid numbers are not yet assigned for ports check out ports/infrastructure/db/user.list in ports tree. I decided to use the range 950-999 for a not yet assigned uid number:

useradd -k "" -r 950..999 -c "goatcounter user" -s /sbin/nologin -m -d /var/goatcounter _goatcounter

5. Create a start script in rc.d for the daemon:

#!/bin/ksh

daemon="/usr/local/bin/goatcounter serve"
daemon_user="_goatcounter"

. /etc/rc.d/rc.subr

rc_bg=YES
rc_reload=NO

pexp="${daemon}.*"

rc_cmd $1

…and make it executable:

chmod 555 /etc/rc.d/goatcounter

6. Set the flags for the daemon and enable and start it, for example:

rcctl set goatcounter flags -db 'sqlite+/var/goatcounter/goatcounter.sqlite3 \
  -listen :8081 -public-port 443 \
  -smtp smtp://localhost:25 \
  -email-from goatcounter@your.domain \
  -errors mailto:postmaster@your.domain,goatcounter@your.domain \
  -tls proxy'

rcctl start goarcounter

7. Then generate the necessary settings for your domain:

su - goatcounter -c 'goatcounter db -db="sqlite+/var/goatcounter/goatcounter.sqlite3" \
  create site -vhost blog.werler.is -user.email uwe@werler.is'

8. Login to the web interface (in this example runnning on port 8081) and set a password for the user.

The service should be ideally hostet under an own domain name with a reverse proxy in front of it. Creating a port could be fun - might be when I’ve some time I’ll try it.