How to deploy Plausible Analytics at Fly.io

What is Plausible Analytics?

Plausible is an alternative to Google Analytics, as described on their website:

Plausible is an intuitive, lightweight, and open-source web analytics tool. It operates without cookies and is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR regulations. Developed and hosted in the EU, it runs on European-owned cloud infrastructure 🇪🇺.

It’s an open-source tool that’s easy to use. You can opt for a monthly subscription or deploy it within your own infrastructure. In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the process of provisioning this amazing tool on fly.io with some simple steps.

Let’s Get Started

To run Plausible in full, we would typically need an SMTP server if we intend to send emails. However, for the purpose of this blog post, we won’t dive into that.

Firstly, you’ll need a fly.io account. We’ll deploy three machines here: one for Fast Open-Source OLAP DBMS - ClickHouse, another for Postgres, and the third for Plausible Community Edition (CE).

This guide is based on the repository GitHub - intever/plausible-hosting. I’ve created a new repository with some updates based on this.

Let’s follow these steps to start building our own infrastructure for analytics:

git clone git@github.com:iagocavalcante/plausible-hosting.git
cd plausible-hosting

Inside the cloned repository, we have two main folders: one for ClickHouse and the other for Plausible Analytics.

Let’s begin with ClickHouse. Navigate to the ClickHouse folder:

cd clickhouse

You may refer to Install flyctl to proceed with the fly configuration.

Assuming you have flyctl installed, let’s create our fly app here with the following command:

fly launch --no-deploy

This command will prompt you to copy the configuration file fly.toml, confirm the settings, and it will open a browser window where you can tweak settings. We’ll change the app’s name to plausible-clickhouse and confirm settings.

Now, let’s create a volume to persist files since fly machines are ephemeral:

flyctl volumes create plausible_clickhouse_data --region gru --size 1

Once created, deploy the ClickHouse app:

fly deploy

Now, let’s move to the Plausible folder:

cd ../plausible

Similarly, launch the Plausible app:

fly launch --no-deploy

Follow the prompts, changing the database part in the browser settings as necessary. Confirm the settings and proceed. This command will create an app and Postgres database for us.

From:

To:

Save DATABASE_URL in a safe place if you want to connect later.

Update the .env-example file with the correct information:

SECRET_KEY_BASE=your_secret_key
ADMIN_USER_NAME=Your_Name
ADMIN_USER_EMAIL=your_email@example.com
ADMIN_USER_PWD=generated_password
BASE_URL=https://yourdomain.com
DISABLE_REGISTRATION=invite_only

Also change the CLICKHOUSE_DATABASE_URL to the ClickHouse URL app we create after deploying the ClickHouse app. It should look like this:

[env]
  CLICKHOUSE_DATABASE_URL= "http://plausible-clickhouse-wandering-sun-4794.internal:8123/plausible_events_db"

Now, set these secrets inside our app at fly:

flyctl secrets import < .env-example

Make a final change in our fly.toml file:

[deploy]
  release_command = 'db migrate'

Change this to:

[deploy]
  release_command = 'db createdb'

Deploy the Plausible app:

fly deploy

The release command may succeed, but the machine might not be healthy. In this case, change back the release command to db migrate in fly.toml and deploy again.

[deploy]
  release_command = 'db migrate'

Then, deploy again:

fly deploy

Check the URL for the app, and if everything is okay, you should see the screen to fill in the fields. You can now configure Plausible for your site/domains and have a good self-hosted analytics tool for free or at a low cost.

That’s it, folks. See you soon! 🚀

references:

• Plausible Analytics
• Fly.io
• Self host Plausible with Fly