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 accge of Linount, 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 on a CentOS 7 server.
Install Matomo on CentOS 7
Step 1. First let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.
yum clean all yum -y update
Step 2. Install LAMP server.
A CentOS 7 LAMP stack server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also install required PHP modules:
yum -y install php-gd php-imap php-ldap php-odbc php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-mssql php-snmp php-soap php-tidy curl curl-devel
Step 3. Installing Matomo on CentOS 7.
First thing to do is to go to Matomo’s download page and download the latest stable version of Piwik:
cd /var/www/html/ wget https://builds.matomo.org/piwik.zip
Unpack the Matomo archive to the document root directory on your server:
unzip matomo.zip -d /var/www/html/ mv /var/www/html/piwik/ /var/www/html/matomo/
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/matomo
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:
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE matomo; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON matomo.* TO 'matomo'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD'; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; MariaDB [(none)]> \q
Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Matomo.
We will create Apache virtual host for your Matomo website. First create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file with using a text editor of your choice:
nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf
Next, create the virtual host:
mkdir /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/ nano /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf
Add the following lines:
ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot /var/www/html/matomo ServerName yourdomain.com ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log" CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined <Directory "/var/www/html/matomo/"> DirectoryIndex index.html index.php Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted
Save and close the file. Restart the Apache service for the changes to take effects:
systemctl restart httpd.service
Step 6. 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 Install Matomo open source web analytics application on CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Matomo on web site.
