GreatestHits

Overview

A simple proof-of-concept logging service for URLs. GreatesHits only provides storage (in a SQLite database) and a web server (in Express) for enabling inserts and reads on the database. It does not provide any analytics tools - third party applications need to provide those.

Why not use Matomo? While Matomo is awesome, it is focused on campaigns, SEO and analytics services. Greatest Hits does one thing: it stores records documenting when a resource at a URL was requested. Like Matomo, it does this by receiving a request at its own web server's endpoint. If you need Matomo's features, use it. If you only need what Greatest Hits does, you may want to consider using it instead.

Requirements

SQLite
Node.js v11.x or higher
- Express, SQLite. Both of these Node modules are installed automatically.

Installation

Clone this GitHub repo
npm install
In the greatesthits directory, create the SQLite database: sqlite3 hits.db "create table hits (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, time TEXT, url TEXT, type TEXT, source_ip TEXT);"

Running the web server

To run the Greatest Hits web server, run node GreatestHits.js.
To stop the Greatest Hits web server, hit ctrl-c.

Inserting records

curl -v "http://localhost:3000/insert?url=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Fnode%2F30&type=v&ip=142.45.345.56"

Query parameters:

url: the URL you wanto to record a hit on. Must be URL-encoded.
type: v for view, d for a download.
ip: IPV4 (for now) address of the requester.

Successful insertion will return a 201 status code with no response body.

Reading records

The read endpoint takes one query parameter, url, which takes a URL-encoded URL as its value:

curl -v "http://localhost:3000/read?url=http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A8000%2Fnode%2F7" will return JSON with this structure:

{
   "message":"success",
   "data":[
      {
         "id":10,
         "time":"2020-07-26T20:19:47.353Z",
         "url":"http://localhost:8000/node/7",
         "type":"v",
         "source_ip":"10.0.2.2"
      },
      {
         "id":14,
         "time":"2020-07-26T20:20:30.465Z",
         "url":"http://localhost:8000/node/7",
         "type":"v",
         "source_ip":"10.0.2.2"
      },
      {
         "id":22,
         "time":"2020-07-26T20:22:52.197Z",
         "url":"http://localhost:8000/node/7",
         "type":"v",
         "source_ip":"10.0.2.2"
      }
   ]
}

Empty results will return a 200 response code with a response body of {"message":"success","data":[]}.

Important functionality missing (this is a proof of concept)

authentication
a way to query usage data for a date range
a third-party application to do something useful with the collected data (but there is the GreatestHits Drupal module, which could render some pretty reports)
geolocation data, e.g., IP2Location LITE