Configure GoatCounter with Caddy 2

Web analytics applications

I had been using Google Analytics for a while. It's easy to setup. Just add a script and is ready to go. Then I checked out the open source alternatives. Matomo was originally based on Piwik, but Piwik Pro went commercial only and is not open source anymore. Matomo is open source and is written in PHP.

I had tried Matomo with Caddy web server. Here's my comment. I had no problem to install it. But after installation, it said it had problem with the HTTP headers or proxy settings and I can't login after install. Also, it is hard to protect Matomo in Caddy, it has lots of paths that is required to process by PHP and also lots of paths (e.g. tmp, plugins, config) that should be protected and not accessible from Internet. Currently, it is better to be used with Nginx or Apache (some .htaccess files are provided by Matomo). There is no permanent free hosting plan offered by Matomo now.

Plausible is another trending open source web analytics application. It is written in Elixir and the Phoenix framework. However, it requires two database products (PostgreSQL and Clickhouse DB). Like Matomo, there is no permanent free hosting plan provided by Plausible now.

Enter GoatCounter

GoatCounter was created by Martin Tournoij. This application is open source and is using the European Public License. GoatCounter.com offered a free hosting plan (for non-commercial use only) and other commercial plans. Since it is open source, I would like to self-host it.

GoatCounter is written in Go language, it is delivered as a single executable. For storage it supports a local SQLite database or connect to PostgreSQL. Check out this web page for building and installation instruction. GoatCounter can be used as webserver on it's own and it supports ACME. For my blog, I had already occupied port 80 and 443 by Caddy to forward request to an existing application (Meiliserach). So, I would make GoatConter to listen on a TCP port other than 80 or 443. Then use virtual hosting in Caddy.

It is worth to mention about privacy and web analytics. Whatever web analytics application you are going to use, you should check if the application or how you collect the data is compliant to GDPR. For my blog, it requires users to accept the Cookie Consent before sending analytics data to GoatCounter.

Setup GoatCounter

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# groupadd --system goatcounter
# useradd --system --gid goatcounter --create-home --home-dir /home/goatcounter goatcounter
# su - goatcounter

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$ ./goatcounter create -email webmaster@example.org -domain analytics.example.org

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$ ./goatcounter serve -listen 127.0.0.1:8000 -tls none -debug all

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$ ./goatcounter serve -listen 127.0.0.1:8000 -tls http -debug all

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[Unit]
Description=GoatCounter
After=network.target

[Service]
User=goatcounter
Group=goatcounter
WorkingDirectory=/home/goatcounter
# If you are using GoatCounter 1.x, use -tls none
# If you are using GoatCounter 2.0, use -tls http
ExecStart=/home/goatcounter/goatcounter serve -listen 127.0.0.1:8000 -tls none
#ExecStart=/home/goatcounter/goatcounter serve -listen 127.0.0.1:8000 -tls http
SuccessExitStatus=0

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

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# systemctl enable goatcounter
# systemctl start goatcounter

A quick take on web servers

When it comes to web server, the popular products in the market are Apache and Nginx. These are written in C. Apache, is a rock solid web server, it is in business for 25 years. More functionality is added as modules. I feel the Apache configurations a bit sort of boilerplate.

Nginx is another big player in the web server market. According to an article in Wikipedia, Nginx may have surpassed Apache in terms of market share. Anyway, I think Apache and Nginx combined already secured about 60% to 70% of the market share. Nginx was started in 15 years ago. Compared with Apache, I think Nginx is smaller and faster.

Caddy was started in 5 years ago, but it has more "Stars" than the two big players in GitHub. Caddy was written in Go language. The author of Caddy is Matt Holt. In 2017, commercial use of Caddy v1 binaries distributed by official Caddy project would need a commercial license. In 2019, this restriction was lifted. Now all development effort was put into Caddy v2. Caddy v2 was released in May 2020.

Caddy web server notable features:

• Automatically managed HTTPS
  • For public web sites, certificates could be issued from Let's Encrypt automatically
  • For internal IP or internal domains, certificates could be issued from a locally-trusted, embedded CA
  • Web server stays up even there are TLS/OCSP/certificate issues
• Written in Golang. It has better memory safety than application written in C
• Simplicity, it had a small configuration file
• Configuration could be change dynamically via the JSON API
• Markdown rendering
• Experimental HTTP/3 support
• Single binary

For full details, check out the Caddy GitHub website. Note Caddy is a registered trademark of Light Code Labs, LLC.

Configure Caddy

In this article, we would use Caddyfile configuration, instead of JSON configuration.

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# groupadd --system caddy
# useradd --system --gid caddy --home-dir /var/lib/caddy -m --shell /sbin/nologin caddy

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{
  # Replace by your contact email
  email webmaster@example.org
}

# Replace by your domain name and IP address
analytics.example.org {

  bind 172.16.0.2

  # Update it with the IP and port you had configured in GoatCounter
  reverse_proxy {
   to 127.0.0.1:8000
  transport http {
   }
  }

  log {
    # https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/log
    output file /var/log/caddy/access.log {
      roll_size 100
      roll_keep 30
    }
    level info
  }

  @compressExtensions {
    path *.html / */ *.css *.js
  }
  encode @compressExtensions gzip

}

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# mkdir -p /var/log/caddy
# chown caddy:caddy /var/log/caddy

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# caddy validate --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile --adapter caddyfile

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[Unit]
Description=Caddy
Documentation=https://caddyserver.com/docs/
After=network.target network-online.target
Requires=network-online.target

[Service]
User=caddy
Group=caddy
ExecStart=/usr/bin/caddy run --environ --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile --adapter caddyfile
ExecReload=/usr/bin/caddy reload --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile --adapter caddyfile
TimeoutStopSec=5s
LimitNOFILE=1048576
LimitNPROC=512
PrivateTmp=true
ProtectSystem=full
AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

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# systemctl enable caddy
# systemctl start caddy

Configure GoatCounter by using web console

Access the GoatCounter by using the browser. You need to enter the admin user and password when you create the GoatCounter by command line in the previous step. Next, you need to include the JavaScript site code into your website or the template of your static site generator. Configure your domain (for example, it's www.kappawingman.com for me) in the web console. The GoatCounter web analytic application is now ready to use.

Further reading

• GoatCounter official project site
• Caddy official project site
• Getting Started tutorial
• Documentation for Caddy