Use Apache's Mod_usertrack to Get Analytics Without Sharing Data

First a major caveat, I still have Jetpack installed to simplify a few tasks like reducing comment spam. Until I have a replacement for everything it does, it will still track visitors.

You need to know how many people are interacting with your site and where they are interacting with it. Without some form of visitor tracking, I couldn’t be sure what my most visited post types are.

However, right now, website analytics is dominated by a group of companies that view everyone as a product, not the customer. Google, Facebook, and others all offer analytics for site owners, but you, the site owner, don’t control the data, they do. So how do you respect your visitors’ privacy and get useful analytical data for your website? The answer is to host your own. I haven’t made the full jump to a self-hosted analytics software yet, but I am choosing to log some extra data that will make that move easier in the future.

The most basic information I use for analytics is the access logs that Apache makes. The “combined” log format logs the remote IP address, the timestamp of the request, the final response code, the size of its response, the referer, and the user-agent. Apache also includes a couple of extra items for backward compatibility. There are two pieces of information that would complete the analytics picture, which vhost responded, and a cookie to tell if one client made multiple requests.

Apache’s mod_usertrack adds the cookie and adding the vhost is simple. I also decided to add mod_unique_id as well.

To make these changes, you need to enable those modules. For Ubuntu version 18.04 and later sudo a2enmod unique_id usertrack; sudo systemctl reload apache2 will do the trick and reload Apache, so the changes take effect. If you aren’t using Ubuntu, double-check how to enable Apache modules on the Linux distribution that you are using.

After mod_usertrack and mod_unique_id are enabled, they need to be activated and attached to the logs. The following configuration snippet will do that.

#Add configuration for user tracking to the log file
<IfModule mod_usertrack.c>
	CookieDomain .www.rrbrussell.com
	CookieExpires "2 weeks"
	#Requires >=2.4.42
	#CookieHTTPOnly on
	#CookieSameSite Strict
	#CookieSecure On
	CookieName Apache
	CookieTracking on
	LogFormat "%v:%{Apache}C %r %t %{UNIQUE_ID}e" usertrack
	CustomLog "${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/clicktracker.log" usertrack
</IfModule>

You will need to modify the CookieDomain, CookieExpires, and log destination to suit your system but this basic config will get you started. It outputs something like the following.