Self-host Plausible for Static Site Analytics

2023-12-25 2026-05-30 223 words One minute

Contents

Background

We need an analytics tool to track static website visits.
Many users install uBlock, AdBlock, etc., causing many analytics services to miss traffic.

Plausible

Plausible is an open-source analytics tool for tracking static website visits. Its highlights:

Open source under AGPLv3
No cookies, no user tracking, no personal data collection
Small script size, does not affect page load speed
Supports public statistics
Supports email subscription for stats

This article uses docker-compose to deploy Plausible with the official Docker image, excluding email-related components.

Requirements

docker-compose: see official docs

Deployment Guide

git clone https://github.com/plausible/hosting
cd hosting
vim docker-compose.yml

Configuration

version: "3.3"
services:
  # mail:
  #   image: bytemark/smtp
  #   restart: always

  plausible_db:
    image: postgres:14-alpine
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - db-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres

  plausible_events_db:
    image: clickhouse/clickhouse-server:23.3.7.5-alpine
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - event-data:/var/lib/clickhouse
      - ./clickhouse/clickhouse-config.xml:/etc/clickhouse-server/config.d/logging.xml:ro
      - ./clickhouse/clickhouse-user-config.xml:/etc/clickhouse-server/users.d/logging.xml:ro
    ulimits:
      nofile:
        soft: 262144
        hard: 262144

  plausible:
    image: plausible/analytics:v2.0
    restart: always
    command: sh -c "sleep 10 && /entrypoint.sh db createdb && /entrypoint.sh db migrate && /entrypoint.sh run"
    depends_on:
      - plausible_db
      - plausible_events_db
    ports:
      - 8000:8000
    env_file:
      - plausible-conf.env

volumes:
  db-data:
    driver: local
  event-data:
    driver: local

Run docker-compose up -d to start. Visit http://localhost:8000 to see the Plausible interface.

Add a new site.

New site

Copy the site JS snippet.

Copy JS

Add the JS snippet to your static pages to start tracking visits.

Analytics data

This article is translated by deepseek-v4-flash (model: deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash).