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.
Install Piwik on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
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 Piwik web analytics on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.
A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also install all required PHP modules:
sudo apt-get install php7.0-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-mbstring php7.0-mysql libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-geoip php7.0-zip
Step 3. Installing Piwik.
First thing to do is to go to Piwik’s download page and download the latest stable version of Piwik:
cd /var/www/html/ wget http://builds.piwik.org/latest.zip
Unpack the Piwik archive to the document root directory on your server:
unzip latest.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 Piwik.
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 Piwik. 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 Piwik installation:
CREATE DATABASE piwikdb; CREATE USER piwikadmin@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'mySecurepassword'; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON piwik.* TO piwikadmin@localhost; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; exit
Step 5. Accessing Piwik.
Piwik 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 Piwik. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Piwik web analytics on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Piwik web site.