Matomo or formerly known as Piwik, is an open source web analytics application. It rivals Google Analytics and includes even more features and allows you to brand your brand and send out custom daily, weekly, and monthly reports to your clients.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation Matomo open source web analytics on an Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver server.
Install Matomo on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB and PHP) server.
A Ubuntu 18.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also install all required PHP modules:
apt-get install php7.1-cli php7.1-mbstring php7.1-gd php7.1-opcache php7.1-mysql php7.1-json php7.1-mcrypt php7.1-xml php7.1-curl
Step 3. Download the latest version
First thing to do is to go to Matomo’s download page and download the latest stable version of Matomo:
cd /var/www/html/ wget https://builds.matomo.org/piwik.zip
Unzip the Matomo archive to the document root directory on your server:
unzip piwik.zip
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/piwik chmod -R 0755 /var/www/html/piwik/tmp
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Matomo.
By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each steps carefully which will set root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:
mysql_secure_installation
Configure it like this:
- Set root password? [Y/n] y - Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y - Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y - Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y - Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
Next we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the Matomo. Run the following command:
mysql -u root -p
This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Matomo installation:
CREATE DATABASE db_name; GRANT ALL ON db_name.* TO 'username' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; quit
Step 5. Accessing Matomo web analytics application.
Matomo will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/piwik or http://server-ip/piwik and complete the required the steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.
Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed Matomo. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Matomo open source web analytics on your Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Matomo web site.