Diary of a Market Hacker

installing Piwik - Open Source Web Analytics

June 9, 2008 – 5:11 pm

I just wrapped up a couple of installs of Piwik, the open source web analytics software. I’ve used my share of web analytics systems from the old school Webalizer to Google Analytics to aggregate web analytics systems designed for specific business purposes. In this case I needed something as stylin’ as GA without all the tie in to Adwords, Goals and other promo stuff pushed out by Google. Oh yeah, there’s also the fact that I don’t trust Google with my data (I don’t trust a company that says it’s motivator is to not be evil or anything so subject to the bottom line). I quickly concluded that Piwik was the best place to start in the middle of the year 2008 (holy shit, I’m getting old).

Piwik is a tag oriented system that links to your pages with embedded image and js. At this point I have it installed on Drupal, Word Press, Zen Cart and a one-off site Zen Cart hybrid. So far I’m impressed with the interface. The clarity and efficiency of use are excellent.

The install is designed to be simple and as web centric as possible. It’s a simple install and so much better than the systems of old with cumbersome config files and cronjobs. However, There was a problem that will probably trip some folks up. Even with the problems I had, the system was installed and integrated in less than 5 minutes without reading a bunch of documentation! Here’s what I did to get it running.

1. download the code
2. unzip the source to the directory I wanted it in.
3. I used existing databases and usernames. Thus, creation of a new user and database was not needed.
4. READ THE README FILE
5. At this point there were permissions problems. Even though I had 777 set on the piwik directory. The reason was, piwik created it’s tmp directory with permissions that prevented it from writing to tmp. I though that was odd and it’s probably a system quirk not a real problem with Piwik. The fix was to set the permissions on tmp. I reloaded the page that showed the error and it presented another and different error regarding permissions again. …OK. So, I set permissions on tmp and it’s contents again. That fixed it.
6. After tagging the site I went to piwik and received and error regarding the ALTER command. Piwik needs ALTER permissions on it’s tables in order to install plugins. So, I whipped out the MySQL Administrator GUI and gave it ALTER. Unfortunately, the install was screwed up even after installing the plugin and giving it ALTER. So, I reinstalled it all. That part took about 2 minutes. ..no big whoop.
7. I logged in to Piwik and created a user for my client and couple of sites.

All in all I’m quite satisfied with Piwik. I especially like the dynamic nature of the interface. It does what I want and I can develop on it for my own purposes! …ssssswwwweeeeeet

Good work Piwik folks!

-Jeremy Brooks