rwserve-visitor-count v1.0.6
Open Source RWSERVE plugin
Visitor Count
Distinguish robots from humans
Motivation
Monitoring website traffic is important for planning and evaluation purposes. Is the website continuing to attract new visitors or is it declining in popularity? Has a recent campaign been successful in attracting new visitors? Is it time to contemplate adjustments or redesign?
Heavyweight solutions such as Google Analytics go far beyond this plugin's capabilities, but at the risk of ceding control to a third party, which may not be acceptable to your needs.
Customization
This plugin is open source and can be modified or enhanced to perform tasks such as these:
- Counting requests to two or more pages for A/B testing.
- Summarizing activity over different periods, such as hourly or weekly.
- Monitoring visitor click-paths based on the HTTP
referer
header.
Download
The plugin module is available from NPM
. Before proceeding, you should already have Node.js
and RWSERVE
configured and
tested.
This module should be installed on your web server in a well-defined place, so
that it can be discovered by RWSERVE
. The standard place for public domain
plugins is /srv/rwserve-plugins
.
Configuration is Everything
Make the software available by declaring it in the plugins
section of your
configuration file. For detailed instructions on how to do this, refer to the plugins
documentation on the Read Write Tools HTTP/2 Server
website.
TL;DR
The save-as
value is an absolute path to the file to be used to save the visitor
counts. Be sure to enclose this value in GRAVE-ACCENTS. The directory and file
will be created if they don't already exist. Both read and write permissions
must be allowed for the system user "rwserve".
The router
only sends requests to the plugin when the HTTP method is GET
and the
resource path is /favicon.ico
.
Cookbook
A full configuration file with typical settings for a server running on
localhost port 7443, is included in this NPM module at etc/visitor-count-config
.
To use this configuration file, adjust these variables if they don't match your
server setup:
Usage
Server
Start the server using the configuration file just prepared. Use Bash to start the server in the background, like this:
Browser
Use your browser to navigate to the website's homepage, which will automatically
trigger a request for favicon.ico
:
Shutdown and Save
Finally, shut down the server using the process ID of the server. The visitor count file will be saved during the shutdown process.
Deployment
Once you've tested the plugin and are ready to go live, adjust your production
web server's configuration in /etc/rwserve/rwserve.conf
and restart it using systemd
. . .
. . . then monitor its request/response activity with journald
.
Prerequisites
This is a plugin for the Read Write Tools HTTP/2 Server, which works on Linux platforms.
Review
License
The rwserve-visitor-count plugin is licensed under the MIT License.