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Server Setup

Running micro-analytics on a server is a simple two step process:

  1. Start and daemonize the app with pm2
  2. Setup nginx as a reverse proxy to make your service publicy accessible

Prerequisite: A server

If you don't have a server to run this on yet, here is what I do:

I use and like DigitalOcean (referral link) for my servers. A simple, 5$/month droplet will suffice to run this service reliably. (upgrading to more power in case of big traffic is two clicks away too)

Make sure to choose the NodeJS x.x.x on 16.04 (where x.x.x is the highest version number you can find) one-click app when creating the droplet to get the server fully setup with Node and Ubuntu.

Start and deamonize the app

Install micro-analytics on your server by running npm install -g micro-analytics-cli in its shell.

We'll use pm2 to start and deamonize the app. This means that the app isn't bound to the terminal, and we'll also make pm2 start the app when the server start. (this avoids the service being down in case your server reboots)

First run npm install -g pm2 to get pm2, then run pm2 start micro-analytics. This tells pm2 to run micro-analytics in the background.

To make sure our service stays up even if the server reboots we run pm2 startup ubuntu (replace ubuntu with whatever OS you're using) and pm2 save.

Set up nginx

Get nginx by running sudo apt-get install nginx, then configure it to reroute all incoming requests to the server to micro-analytics.

Delete the default site from nginx by running sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default, then create a new one by running sudo touch /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/<yoursite>. (replace <yoursite> with your site name)

We want to reroute all requests for any path that come in to localhost:3000 (where micro-analytics is running), so edit the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/<yoursite> file to look like this:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name yoursite.com;

  location ~^.*$ {
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
  }

  # This will avoid favicon.ico being counted when you test the service
  # in the browser.
  location = /favicon.ico {
    access_log off;
    log_not_found off;
    return 204;
  }
}

(note that I have no idea what I'm doing here, this was copied from this tutorial)