In this tutorial, we will explain the installation of Piwik on a Debian 9 VPS. Piwik is a free and open-source web analytics tool written by a team of international developers. It can run on a webserver with PHP and MySQL/MariaDB. It tracks online visits to one or more websites and displays reports on these visits for analysis. Among many things, it provides real time data updates, content tracking, goal conversion tracking, event tracking, analytics for e-commerce websites, site search analytics, geolocation and much more.

You have to install the following requirements to run Piwik on your Debian 9 VPS:

• Web server such as Apache, Nginx, etc.
• PHP version 5.5.9 or newer, with pdo and pdo_mysql, or the mysqli extension enabled
• MySQL/MariaDB version 5.5 or newer.

Get started

Log in to your VPS via SSH as user root

ssh root@IP_ADDRESS -p PORT_NUMBER

replace ‘IP_ADDRESS’ and ‘PORT_NUMBER’ with your actual IP address and SSH port number

and execute the following command to make sure that all the system packages are up to date

apt-get update && apt-get update

Install Apache

To install Apache web server, run the following command

apt-get install apache2

Once it is installed enable the service to start on boot

systemctl enable apache2

Verify that Apache is running on your server

systemctl status apache2

● apache2.service - The Apache HTTP Server
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/apache2.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running)

Install PHP

Piwik is a PHP based application, so we will install PHP 7 on the server

apt-get install php php-mysql php-mbstring php-xml

Install MariaDB and create database

Now, we have our Apache web server and PHP setup and ready and the next step is to install a database server. We will install the latest version of MariaDB server

apt-get install mariadb-server

After it is installed, start the database server and make it to automatically start on boot

apt-get start mariadb
apt-get enable mariadb

Run the mysql_secure_installation script provided by MariaDB, to set your root password and enhance the security of your MariaDB server. Next, login to the MariaDB server as user root

mysql -u root -p

and create a database and user for Piwik

mysql> CREATE DATABASE piwik;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on piwik.* to 'piwikuser'@'localhost' identified by 'PASSWORD';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> exit

Don’t forget to replace ‘PASSWORD’ with an actual, strong password.

Install Piwik

We have installed full LAMP stack and your Debian 9 VPS meets all the requirements to run Piwik. The final step is to install and configure Piwik.

Download the latest version of the application from their official website

wget https://builds.piwik.org/piwik.zip

and unpack the archive to the document root directory on your server

unzip piwik.zip -d /var/www/html/

This will create a new directory ‘piwik’ containing the necessary files and directories.

Change the ownership of the piwik directory

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/piwik

Finally, go to http://yourdomain.tld/piwik or http://yourip/piwik and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the Piwik installation.

For more details on how to configure Piwik, please read their official documentation.

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