ActiveAnalytics

First-party, privacy-focused traffic analytics for Ruby on Rails applications.

Programming language: Ruby

License: MIT License

Tags: Admin Interface     Analytics     Open Source     Privacy    

README

ActiveAnalytics

Simple traffic analytics for the win of privacy.

• NO cookies
• NO JavaScript
• NO third parties
• NO bullshit

ActiveAnalytics is a Rails engine directly mountable in your Ruby on Rails application. It doesn't reveal anything about specific visitors. It cannot be blocked by adblockers or other privacy-protecting extensions (and doesn't need to).

ActiveAnalytics lets you know about:

• Sources: What are the pages and domains that bring some traffic.
• Page views: What are the pages that are the most viewed in your application.
• Next/previous page: What are the entry and exit pages for a given page of your application.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'active_analytics'

Then execute bundle and run the migration:

bundle
rails active_analytics:install:migrations
rails db:migrate

Your controllers have to call ActiveAnalytics.record_request(request) to record page views. The Rails way to achieve is to use a before_action :

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  before_action :record_page_view

  def record_page_view
    # Add a condition to record only your canonical domain
    # and use a gem such as crawler_detect to skip bots.
    ActiveAnalytics.record_request(request)
  end
end

In case you don't want to record all page views, because each application has sensitive URLs such as password reset and so on, simply define a skip_before_action :record_page_view in the relevant controller.

Finally, just add the route to ActiveAnalytics dashboard at the desired endpoint:

mount ActiveAnalytics::Engine, at: "analytics"  # http://localhost:3000/analytics

Authentication and permissions

ActiveAnalytics cannot guess how you handle user authentication, because it is different for all Rails applications. So you have to monkey patch ActiveAnalytics::ApplicationController in order to inject your own mechanism. Create a file in config/initializers/active_analytics.rb to add a before action :

# config/initializers/active_analytics.rb
require_dependency "active_analytics/application_controller"

module ActiveAnalytics
  class ApplicationController
    before_action :require_admin

    def require_admin
      # This example supposes there are current_user and User#admin? methods
      raise ActionController::RoutingError.new("Not found") unless current_user.try(:admin?)
    end
  end
end

If you have Devise, you can check the permission directly from routes.rb :

# config/routes.rb
authenticate :user, -> (u) { u.admin? } do # Supposing there is a User#admin? method
  mount ActiveAnalytics::Engine, at: "analytics" # http://localhost:3000/analytics
end

License

The gem is available as open-source under the terms of the MIT License.

Made by Base Secrète.

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