Simple, performant, local analytics for Rails. Solves 95% of your needs until your ready to start taking analytics more seriously using another tool.

Out of the box the following request details are tracked:

• day
• total (count per day)
• url_hostname (site)
• url_path (page)
• referrer_hostname
• referrer_path
• platform (ios, android, linux, osx, windows, etc)
• browser_engine (blink, gecko, webkit, or nil)

It is fully customizable to store more details if desired.

# Gemfile
gem "rails_local_analytics"

Add the following migration to your app:

bundle exec rails g migration CreateAnalyticsTables

# db/migrations/..._create_analytics_tables.rb

class CreateAnalyticsTables < ActiveRecord::Migration[6.0]
  def up
    create_table :tracked_requests_by_day_page do |t|
      t.date :day, null: false
      t.bigint :total, null: false, default: 1
      t.string :url_hostname, null: false
      t.string :url_path, null: false
      t.string :referrer_hostname
      t.string :referrer_path
    end
    add_index :tracked_requests_by_day_page, :day

    create_table :tracked_requests_by_day_site do |t|
      t.date :day, null: false
      t.bigint :total, null: false, default: 1
      t.string :url_hostname, null: false
      t.string :platform
      t.string :browser_engine
    end
    add_index :tracked_requests_by_day_site, :day
  end

  def down
    drop_table :tracked_requests_by_day_page
    drop_table :tracked_requests_by_day_site
  end
end

The reason we store our analytics in two separate tables to keep the cardinality of our data low. You are permitted to store everything in only one table but I recommend you try the 2 table approach first and see if it meets your needs. See the performance optimization section for more details.

Add the route for the analytics dashboard at the desired endpoint:

# config/routes.rb
mount RailsLocalAnalytics::Engine, at: "/admin/analytics"

Its generally recomended to use a background job (especially since we now have solid_queue). If you would like to disable background jobs you can use the following config option:

# config/initializers/rails_local_analytics.rb
# RailsLocalAnalytics.config.background_jobs = false # defaults to true

The next step is to collect traffic.

There are two types of analytics that we mainly target:

• Site level analytics
  • Stored in the table tracked_requests_by_day_site
• Page level analytics
  • Stored in the table tracked_requests_by_day_page

Your controllers have to manually call RailsLocalAnalytics.record_request. For example:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  after_action :record_page_view

  private

  def record_page_view
    return if !request.format.html? && !request.format.json?

    ### We accept manual overrides of any of the database fields
    ### For example if you wanted to track bots:
    site_based_attrs = {}
    if some_custom_bot_detection_method
      site_based_attrs[:platform] = "bot"
    end

    RailsLocalAnalytics.record_request(
      request: request,
      custom_attributes: { # optional
        site: site_based_attrs,
        page: {},
      },
    )
  end
end

If you need to add more data to your events you can simply add more columns to the analytics tables and then populate these columns using the :custom_attributes argument.

Some examples of additional things you may want to track:

• Bot detection
  • Bot detection is difficult. As such we dont try to include it by default. Recommended gem for detection is crawler_detect
  • One option is to consider not tracking bots at all in your analytics, just a thought
  • You may not need to store this in a new column, one example pattern could be to store this data in the existing platform database field
• Country detection
  • Country detection is difficult. As such we dont try to include it by default.
  • Consider using language detection instead
• Language detection
  • You can gather the language from the request.env["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"] or browser.accept_language.first.full
• Users or organizations
  • You may want to track your users or another model which is a core tenant to your particular application

There are a few techniques that you can use to tailor the database for your particular needs. Heres a few examples:

• If you drop any database columns from the analytics tables this will not cause any issues. It will continue to function as normal.
• url_hostname column
  • If you wont ever have multi-site needs then you can consider removing this column
  • If storage space is an issue you may consider switching to an enum column as the number of permutations is probably something that can be anticipated.
• referrer_host and referrer_path columns
  • Consider just storing "local" or nil instead if the request originated from your website
• platform and browser_engine columns
  • Consider dropping either of these if you do not need this information
• If you want to store everything in one table (which I dont think most people actually need) then you can simply only create one table (I recommend tracked_requests_by_day_page) with all of the fields from both tables. This gem will automatically populate all the same fields. You should NOT need to use :custom_attributes in this scenario.

If you are not in a controller or do not have access to the request object then you may pass in a hash representation. For example:

RailsLocalAnalytics.record_request(
  request: {
    host: "http://example.com",
    path: "/some/path",
    referrer: "http://example.com/some/other/path",
    user_agent: "some-user-agent",
    http_accept_language: "some-http-accept-language",
  },
  # ...
)

By default all data is retained indefinately. If you would like to have automated deletion of the data, you might use the following example technique:

class ApplicationController
  after_action :record_page_view

  private

  def record_page_view
    # perform other logic and call RailsLocalAnalytics.record_request

    TrackedRequestsByDayPage.where("day < ?", 3.months.ago).delete_all
    TrackedRequestsByDaySite.where("day < ?", 3.months.ago).delete_all
  end
end

We dont do any page performance tracking (request/response time, etc), this gem only specializes in analytics.

If you are looking for a simple performance tracking solution, I highly recommend the gem inner_performance

Run server using: bin/dev or cd test/dummy/; rails s

bundle exec rspec

We can locally test different versions of Rails using ENV['RAILS_VERSION']

export RAILS_VERSION=7.0
bundle install
bundle exec rspec

Created & Maintained by Weston Ganger - @westonganger

Imitated some parts of active_analytics. Thanks to them for the aggregate database schema idea.