Plausible has made it easy to move away from Google Analytics

I am increasingly concerned about the growing big-tech surveillance state. As a worker in tech I know all too well how much personally identifiable information is shared by simply visiting a web site. Google is not the worst company in this regard, but they are certainly one of the most pervasive. Over the past few years, I have engaged in a never ending game of whack-a-mole to De-Google my life.

  • I moved my email and calendar from Gmail to Fastmail
  • I stopped using Google Maps in favor of Apple maps
  • I have requested my data be deleted from numerous Google services
  • I use a self-hosted Whoogle as my search engine allowing me to access Google’s search results without any ads, javascript, AMP links, cookies, or IP address tracking
  • I run a pi-hole which blocks Google telemetry and ads from all my devices
  • My home router redirects any calls to Google’s DNS or NTP servers to other providers

One of the last areas I still relied on Google was for web analytics for this blog and my band’s website.

I chose Plausible.io to replace Google Analytics for the following reasons:

  • It is privacy respecting out of the box and only collects the minimal amount of information necessary to provide top-line analytics
  • It is open source
  • The script is only 1kb so my static website will continue to have fast page load times
  • It is simple to self-host. Their documentation is complete and easy to follow
  • No cross-device or cross-site tracking
  • No cookies and other persistent identifiers
  • Self hosting Plausible allows me to ensure that data is not sent to any third parties
  • Plausible offers a paid service, but is FOSS when self-hosted. Outside of paying for a VPS, this is free

The first step was figuring out where to host my analytics server. I could host this at home for free but I avoid opening any ports on my home network to the internet. So I set up a small vps at my my favorite cloud platform. I don’t need anything beefy here, I selected the smallest possible VPS with a total cost $5/month.

Next, I needed a publicly available domain name for this server. I purchased one and moved the DNS to Cloudflare

I created an Ansible playbook to install all the necessary services on my VPS. If you’re not familiar with Ansible, it is a simple but powerful tool to manage remote computers with a series of yaml files.

The full playbook is publicly available on Github.

This playbook performs the following tasks.

  • Install Docker on the server
  • Ensure Cloudflare’s proxy always points to the correct IP address of my VPS with a custom bash script.
  • Install Traefik as a reverse proxy
  • Install Authelia for authentication and authorization services
  • Install CrowdSec to secure the server itself
  • Install Plausible Analytics providing statistics for my publicly available web sites.

Configuring Plausible Analytics proved incredibly simple. I only needed to add a few items to the docker-compose.yml that they provide in their git repository.

  1. Labels to allow Traefik to point to the Plausible container

     services:
     plausible:
         labels:
             - "traefik.enable=true"
             - "traefik.http.routers.stats.rule=Host(`stats.{{ domain_name }}`)"
             - "traefik.http.routers.stats.entrypoints=web,websecure"
             - "traefik.http.routers.stats.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"
             - "traefik.http.routers.stats.middlewares=chain-authelia@file"

  2. Add my docker network to the compose file

     networks:
     traefik_proxy:
         name: traefik_proxy
         external: true

  3. Add my docker network to each service

     services:
     service-name:
         networks:
           - traefik_proxy
         ...

  4. Allow public access to the analytics service via an Authelia access rule

     access_control:
     default_policy: deny
     rules:
         - domain: "stats.{{ domain_name }}"
           resources:
               - '^/js/.*\.js$' # Access to the analytics javascript
               - "^/api([/?].*)?$" # Access to the API
               - "^/natelandau.com.*$" # Share the stats publicly
               - "^/share/.*$" # Allow embedded stats in a web page
           policy: bypass

The team at Plausible has done an amazing job. Their documentation is simple to follow and their self-hosted platform worked flawlessly the first time.

The last step was to edit my Jekyll blog templates to remove Google analytics and replace it with Plausible. Here’s the commit showing the changes.

Now, Google is no longer spying on visitors to this site. I’ve made the full dashboard available publicly. You can view it here.

I can also embed the stats in this site. Awesome.

There are a few remaining steps that I plan on tackling next.

  1. Update my band’s website to use Plausible
  2. Import my old data from Google Analytics using Plausible’s import tool