Ditch Google analytics for Umami
I am not a fan of Google analytics. It feels bloated, even more so for a personal website. After going through a lot of it’s alternatives, I think that umami is one of the best choices. Umami is self hosted and in this article I’ll go through the steps of setting it up. I hosted the umami client on vercel and the database on a digitalocean droplet. I didn’t opted for managed database in digitalocean because I plan to play around with the VPS in the future(maybe self-host an email client).
Setting up database server
I am assuming that you have provisioned an Ubuntu VPS on digitalocean (or any other cloud provider of your choice). First we’ll do some setup. SSH as root user into the droplet.
Basic setup for a fresh VPS
Update the package index and upgrade versions.
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
Create a new user with admin privileges.
adduser mak
usermod -aG sudo mak
Copy the ssh keys from root to the new user.
rsync --archive --chown=mak:mak ~/.ssh /home/mak
Now relogin as this new user instead of root (it’s a best practice).
Setup a basic firewal and allow ssh and database connections.
sudo ufw allow OpenSSH
sudo ufw allow 3306
sudo ufw enable
Install and start MySQL server
sudo apt install mysql-server
sudo systemctl start mysql.service
Run the following command to configure MySQL. It will prompt self-explanatory questions. It’s recommended to accept all of them.
sudo mysql_secure_installation
Create a new MySQL user.
Open the MySQL shell
sudo mysql
Create a user and grant privileges
CREATE USER 'mak'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY '<your-password>';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'mak'@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Here % is a wildcard which signifies that mak can connect with the server from any host.
Exit the shell by entering exit.
Allow remote connections to mysql
Open the file /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf in your favourite editor and change bind-address from 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0. Restart the MySQL service for this change to take effect by running sudo systemctl restart mysql
Create DB and tables for umami
Open the MySQL shell.
mysql -u mak -p
Create a new DB for umami. I am naming it umami but any other name will also work.
CREATE DATABASE umami;
Create a file named schema.sql and paste the sql code written in umami/sql/schema.mysql.sql. Now run the following command to create the required tables.
mysql -u mak -p umami < schema.sql
With this, our database setup is complete.
Deploying umami on vercel
You will have to fork the umami repository. After that import your fork as a project in vercel. Make sure to add the following 2 environment variables.
DATABASE_URL=mysql://mak:<your-password>@<vps-ip-address>:3306/umami
HASH_SALT=<random-string>
Other settings like build command, build folder can be left as default.
After the deployment is complete, vercel will provide a url. Navigate to <url>/login. There is already an account created with the credentials admin(username) and umami(password) when we created the tables in our db. Login using these credentials and make sure to change your password.
Start tracking your website
This step is pretty straightforward. In the settings page, add your website. It will give you tracking code which you will have to paste in the <head> section of your website. After that umami will start tracking visits to your website. Watch it on your dashboard.