Privacy-Focused Web Analytics Tool | Generated by AI
Question: What is Plausible Analytics (github.com/plausible/analytics)?
Answer:
Plausible is an open-source, privacy-focused web analytics tool — a lightweight Google Analytics alternative.
Core points:
- Privacy-first: No cookies, no persistent identifiers, GDPR/CCPA/PECR compliant by design. No personal data collected, so no cookie consent banner needed.
- Lightweight script: The tracking snippet is <1 KB — roughly 75x smaller than the GA bundle. Less page-weight, faster loads.
- Single-page dashboard: All key metrics (visitors, pageviews, sources, top pages, countries, devices) on one screen instead of GA’s deep menu trees.
- Self-hostable: Apache 2.0 licensed core, ships a Docker Compose setup (Community Edition). You run it on your own box and own the data. There’s also a paid managed cloud version that funds development.
Stack (relevant to you):
- Backend: Elixir / Phoenix
- Data store: ClickHouse (columnar OLAP — handles the event aggregation queries fast), PostgreSQL for app metadata
- Frontend: React + Tailwind
The ClickHouse + Elixir combo is the interesting architectural bit — events stream into ClickHouse, and the dashboard runs aggregation queries against the columnar store rather than scanning row-oriented tables. That’s why it stays snappy at scale.
For your lzwjava.github.io blog/notes, self-hosted Plausible on your 192.168.1.36 workstation (or a small VPS) via Docker Compose would give you cookie-free traffic stats without GA’s bloat or privacy baggage. The script just needs your domain whitelisted.
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